


five minutes west of irvine

by birdcat



Series: north : south : east : west [4]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Future Fic, Get-Together Fic, M/M, its all oikawa always has been, thank you haikyuu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25382200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdcat/pseuds/birdcat
Summary: Or maybe it’s just the Argentinian national team shirt. In the dim, the blue could be mistaken for Seijou teal. Or the cobalt of Kitagawa Daiichi. Maybe that’s Oikawa’s cosmic trajectory, Hajime thinks—forever graduating from one shade of blue into the next.In which Oikawa returns to Tokyo for the Olympics. In which it's been a while. In which the reunion is clumsy.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Series: north : south : east : west [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653538
Comments: 141
Kudos: 1177





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> this is the fourth and final part of north/south/east/west, but it can be read separately from the rest of the series without you missing anything. a spiritual sequel above all.
> 
> thank you for all the love on this series. i hope you’ll trust me to you on one last journey, extra-long, full to the brim with miracles. i hope you'll believe me when i say: i love these boys. you're in good hands.
> 
> here’s to haikyuu.

It was advertised to him as Makki’s idea. Maybe that should have been the first smoking gun.

It’s the last thing Hajime is thinking about as he’s being led up to Kyoutani’s third-floor apartment. It’s Tokyo, mid-June, nothing short of pastel-green hysteria outside the landing’s windows. The apartment is in a much nicer complex than he thought anyone their age could afford, and he has to bite his tongue to stop himself from making a remark about it to Mattsun, who’s fumbling with the spare key. Hajime loosens and tightens his grip around the sake he brought, a small gift he hopes is just cheeky enough to earn him groans.

“In ‘ya go,” Mattsun croons, finally. The door swings open, and it’s a grainy darkness inside. The smile he shoots Hajime is alarmingly bright.

“Alright.” Hajime takes a final look at him and enters.

  
  


The call had come a week ago. “I know you’re curing cancer in Osaka or whatever, but do you think you could make it up to Tokyo this weekend?”

Hajime had frowned against his phone. He stood straight-backed in the tangled heart of the lab, a clipboard digging into his waist, a spreadsheet blurring on the screen in front of him. He wasn’t supposed to be taking calls on the clock, anyways. 

“What for?”

Mattsun had cleared his throat. “We’re throwing a surprise party for Yahaba. Graduation and all. Makki’s idea. Says he wants to scare him so bad he forgets everything and has to go through undergrad again. Whole crew’s gonna be there.”

Hajime frowned more deeply, and set his clipboard down. When he looked up, the laboratory wall stared back, clinically white, plastered-over with smudged whiteboards and notes. Utsui had left in mid-morning, leaving him and Ueno to finish up data entry for the day. Far from his favorite part of the job, but with a month of sixty-hour workweeks behind him, something of a respite, and the only time he wouldn’t feel a crushing guilt over taking a call. He glanced at the clock: one in the afternoon. The lab was always quiet around this time, treadmills eerily still, monitors hanging from their rigs as if frozen in time.

“The whole crew?” he asked. He forced down any discomfort in his voice.

“Yeah,” Mattsun said. “Kyoutani’s hosting. Dude’s got a sweet apartment. And I’m pretty sure, like, Yahaba’s sisters are gonna be there, and some of his college friends. But Kindaichi and Kunimi are coming down from Sendai, and Watari’s coming in from Hiroshima, or at least Makki says. Makki and I are coming too, obviously.” The list was rattled off as if practiced. “We’re waitin’ on you, man.”

Hajime let go of the counter, started at the realization that he’d been gripping it. It was odd that Mattsun was calling him at this time of day. He’d been living in Osaka for six weeks, he and his roommate from Irvine chasing down an old professor of theirs for internships; he’d begrudgingly advertised himself as mostly off-limits, knowing that whatever Makki and Mattsun had been brewing in Tokyo since graduation would prove difficult to keep away from otherwise. _I’m probably going back to California in August, anyways,_ he’d said, but he hadn’t known if it was true. He still didn’t.

“I mean. . .” he began. He’d seen them only once since coming back, a blur of a night out that had landed them in Makki’s apartment the next morning, hungover and belligerent enough to remember none of it. Ueno was the only one with hours this weekend; Hajime could cram in his analysis on the train. Would it hurt to see everyone? “I guess, man. I don’t see why not.”

Mattsun’s laugh, crackling through the phone’s speakers. “Nice. Nice. Saturday at seven, no earlier, no later. Yahaba’s supposed to show up at eight. We’re gonna make him shit his pants. I’ll text you the details.”

“Mmph.” Hajime shifted the phone from one ear to another, wiggled his computer mouse to get the spreadsheet to pop back up, already distant. “Got it.”

“Oh, and,” Mattsun cut in. His voice dropped. “Don’t tell Oikawa you’re coming up. I know you’re gonna want to, but Makki wants to see if he can, like, FaceTime him in at the end or something. Doesn’t want him to know.” He barked out a laugh. “I can trust you to keep one secret from him, right?”

Hajime blinked unseeingly at the computer screen. It took him too long to respond. “Yeah, man, no worries.”

“See you there!” Mattsun killed the line.

Hajime let the phone sit between his ear and his shoulder for a couple seconds before setting it down. Outside the window, June was blistering and bright, punching beams of incandescence through the blinds and onto the linoleum. Around him, nothing but the hum of the machines.

How was he supposed to explain that he wasn’t gonna tell Oikawa, anyways?

  
  


He knows something is off when Yahaba is there, staring at him, as soon as he enters the apartment. That is not how surprise parties work. There are a couple seconds of utter confusion where the lights flick on, and everyone in the living room is frozen for moment, wide-eyed like they’ve been placed there on accident. And then the lights flick off again, and then Kindaichi is shouting somewhere behind him, and the lights come back on and stay this time.

Hajime stands there in front of Yahaba for a couple seconds, dumb, sake in his hands, and asks: “Isn’t this supposed to be your surprise party?”

He doesn’t get an answer. The room seems to erupt into conversation all at once, as if on cue. Heads jerk away. No one looks at him. Hajime’s confusion increases tenfold. Around him there’s Watari, and Kunimi, and a couple women suddenly talking amongst themselves who must be Yahaba’s sisters, and Makki’s girlfriend who he’s met all of once. He cranes his neck to try to catch Mattsun’s eye, who’s standing by the door with Kindaichi and Kyoutani, suddenly deeply engrossed in conversation. Hajime frowns. He’s missed something, or ten things.

Yahaba’s right next to him, then, smiling in an uncanny sort of way and taking the sake from his hands. “Is this aged?”

“What’s going on?”

Yahaba’s face screws up, almost like he pities him. “Wouldn’t expect aged from a broke grad student. Really missed us, huh?”

“What are you—what is this?”

Whatever weak poker face Yahaba’s holding together almost breaks, then, and suddenly he’s leading Hajime over to the couch, and draping himself onto it. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. He pats the spot on the couch next to him. “We’ve got it all under control.”

Hajime senses amusement rising in himself, then, as he slowly takes a seat beside him. “Isn’t this your surprise party?” Around him, people are stealing glances, and jerking their heads away when he catches their eye. He almost gets Watari to break.

Yahaba beams at him, already beginning to tear at the bottle’s packaging. “This alcohol is for me, right?”

Hajime can’t help but smile at his dedication. “Uh, if it’s your party, then yeah.”

“Hmm.” Yahaba feigns thoughtfulness as he studies the label. “I guess you could say it’s my party, since I get to watch.”

“What? Watch what?” It hits Hajime, then, like a club to the face. His head shoots up. “Wait, where’s Makki?”

Yahaba meets his gaze, eyes blown wide in alarm or amusement. He doesn’t have enough time to answer. “Funny you ask, ‘cause—”

The door flies open. Makki’s there in the doorway, and every head in the room jerks towards him. His eyes search and find Hajime, and then he’s grinning.

And then, stepping out from behind him with a look of utter bewilderment on his face, is Oikawa.

Yahaba has Hajime by the arm; they’ve stood up off the couch, and Yahaba’s bringing him halfway across the room towards Oikawa and leaving him there.

“ _Surprise!_ ” It’s an explosion, the whole room at once.

Time freezes. Hajime looks to Oikawa, and Oikawa is looking back. A channel is carved out between them where the crowd has stepped back and is watching. The obvious, pressing question is answered in an instant: _No, Oikawa didn’t know either._ There’s a look of panic on his face that he smothers immediately. A smile, taut at the edges, takes its place. His eyes crinkle in some dim attempt at mirth. _Oh, God._

A surprise party. For them. Oikawa is supposed to be in Argentina. He’s supposed to be in Osaka. A surprise reunion. They got them together. Of course.

Oikawa is tanned, and somehow taller, and his hair is shorter, and the years have worked miracles on him. He’s wearing the white-blue of his Argentinean team like armor, the flag on his sleeve, and he looks so much like himself that it hurts. There is, all at once, so space for Hajime’s breath in his lungs. He is not a sight that can be prepared for. When was the last time? Was it that summer, before either of them left? In Hajime’s backward, his shoulders shivering, not half as muscled as they are now, his eyes, wet and gleaming— 

_Don’t tell Oikawa you’re coming up. I can trust you to keep one secret from him, right?_

It’s cruel. Hajime only gets a few seconds of unreality before the room snaps back into focus, and the several moments of silence they’ve spent staring at each other are suddenly glaringly loud. His gut has dropped straight out. He notes distantly that should be doing something. He shouldn’t just stand there; if they just stand there, then everyone will know, and he’ll have to explain himself, and every pair of eyes on the room is trained on them, and it’s dead silent, and—

Oikawa’s arms are around him. He is all too solid, and all too warm, and the white-blue of his t-shirt has a smell that Hajime has never smelled on him before. It’s like betrayal. The deathly silence has broken and there’s the sound of phone cameras and someone else in the room is shouting something—Kindaichi, or Makki, or Mattsun, but Hajime is adrift and utterly deaf to it.

They pull apart, and faced with the sheer brilliance of him up close, Hajime cannot help but wonder if it would have been easier if they had been honest. It is a miracle that they let it get this far. What would it have taken? They’re such fucking cowards. Either of them, a word to Makki, they could have even played down just how bad it was— _Yeah, Oikawa and I just don’t talk that much anymore._ Would it have been that bad?

It could not be worse than this.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says. His voice, pitched across a distance of five years. The room is no longer silent around them, but it’s unnaturally quiet, and when Hajime looks, he finds pairs of eyes watching them questioningly. 

They’ve let it get this far. No point, now.

“Oikawa,” he says, and he pulls him hard into another hug, because he can’t come up with anything else to do. The room cheers, again, and Hajime watches the far wall go blurry. He feels numb where Oikawa’s skin is pressed against his.

It could not be worse than this.

  
  


<<<

  
  


Hajime doesn’t remember the last time he and Oikawa called. He remembers the gaps between the calls better than the calls themselves, the ever-lengthening spaces filled with not-calling first, and the calling second, maybe, if at all.

The last one was probably months ago, approaching a year. He can piece together a memory of it that’s probably only half-invention, late spring delirium, him laying on the fold-out sofa of his walkup in Irvine, watching, sideways, as Ueno did the dishes and the dial tone shouted in his ear. Why was he doing this, again? He had to go to the lab soon. Four, Five, until—

The phone crackled, and the miracle of Oikawa’s voice was on the other end. “Iwaizumi?”

Hajime jolted, and cleared his throat, and Ueno was making alarmed eye contact with him over a soapy dinner plate. “Oikawa,” he said. “Hey.”

And then they probably both smiled tightly into the receiver and talked about something thin and flimsy that they had talked about a hundred times before, like Oikawa’s team. Or the sweltering heat in San Juan. Or the internship Hajime applied for. Or the new hire in Hajime’s lab. _Yeah, the other guy moved to Berkeley._ And Oikawa would try to remember the other guy’s name, just as a kindness, but they both knew he wasn’t going to. Hajime would relieve him, eventually, and Oikawa would sigh, and the line would sit silent for a moment, impossibly heavy in both their hands.

There was no blame. There wasn’t even really a reason. Every time Hajime searched for one, he came up empty. Just the details of their lives, spreading further and further apart. He remembers the yellow couch cushions, the voices of Oikawa’s dozens of teammates and friends in the background, always tugging him away— _¿Con quién estás hablando?_ —and the phone static, always the phone static, as Hajime stared sightlessly across the room while Oikawa talked to them instead. He never learned Spanish. He was never even particularly good at English, until he moved to California. Oikawa would pull the phone away from his face, and Hajime would get the grainy suggestion of him prattling something off in Spanish, and even that shimmer of it would give him vertigo. Oikawa would laugh at something someone else had said, and Hajime would wonder if the earth was splitting open beneath the Yucatan, and Panama was widening into an ocean between them.

And they’d pick conversation back up eventually, and talk about the cracks in their floor, or something Oikawa’s head coach said, or a new insight in Hajime’s research, each topic more frayed and labored than the last. But Oikawa would have to go after a few more minutes, _practice_ , or _warm-ups_ , or another merciful alibi, and Hajime’s shoulder would ache with relief once he set the phone down.

He thought that it was nice, at least, that they still tried sometimes. No matter how stilted their conversations became. Made an effort not to disappoint their younger selves. A cable stretched over the Americas, four time zones and five years in length. How to measure a weight like that?

They set it down permanently sometime in May of that year. Maybe no one would have been strong enough.

  
  


<<<

  
  


He’s alone on the balcony, staring down a darkening Tokyo like it’s his adversary. The lights are white-pink, vertical towers lit up into christmas trees, the traffic a river of glow. The view of downtown is nice. The whole apartment is nice. Way nicer than Kyoutani’s apartment has a right to be, he thinks; he’d overheard somewhere in the throng of bodies how he’d gotten it, and immediately forgotten. It’s sticky-humid outside, the kind of night air that makes you feel like you’re at the bottom of a dark swimming pool, like you could just lie in it and gulp it down until you drown. Or maybe he’s just drunk.

The sake he brought was not aged, Yahaba had made that up on the spot. It goes down nicely, still, and he’s pretty sure that whatever mystery in the glass he’s holding has some of it mixed in. No one had denied him a drink when he’d reached for it; it had dawned on everyone already what was going on. A miscalculation. It had been like a hundred plates shattering, once he and Oikawa pulled apart in the living room for the second time and neither had been able to come up with something to say. Utter vacuum silence. Everyone’s collective realization of the wreckage they were looking at. _Oh, God._

The worst of it was that it looked like they’d had some falling-out while they’d both been abroad. There was none. That vacuum silence. There was just _nothing_.

The look of guilt on Makki’s face had gut-punched him, and he still sees it now, swimming behind his eyelids. _It’s fine, man,_ he’d said, when Makki had tried to pull him into the kitchen to apologize. _There was no way you could’ve known. We just don’t really talk much._ There was nothing he could have said to wipe that horror off of Makki’s face. Watching it dawn on his friends was like seeing it himself for the first time all over again, just how bad it was. _Yeah. It’s that bad._ He hadn’t said that part.

And now everyone inside is doing a winsome job of holding some semblance of a party together, mopping up the nuclear waste. Watari had broken the silence and pulled Hajime away from Oikawa, thrown some music on, begun dishing out drinks. Hajime, wordless, had followed him like a buoy tugged across the surface of the ocean, and watched with mounting dread as the party took on a certain uncanniness. People began talking amongst themselves purposefully, or suddenly found interest in a piece of art on the wall, and politely averted their eyes from Hajime and Oikawa the way people politely avert their eyes from car crashes on the highway.

He’s not sure when he came out on the balcony. Maybe he was dumped out here by Mattsun after his fifth drink, when he began sidestepping all attempts at conversation altogether, and even Oikawa’s tidiest efforts to keep himself at the opposite end of the room could not stop Hajime from glancing at him. All the better.

Oikawa had made the Argentinean Olympic team this spring. The crowd seemed to bring it up slowly, testing if it was okay, and then all at once. It was the only reason he could make it to Tokyo, anyways, for the Olympics. That was the way they’d arranged the surprise, getting Oikawa to fly in a week before the rest of his team. It was nice, and easier to talk about than anything else, and the party was stunningly eager to lean into it. _Isn’t it amazing? He’s their first-string setter._ It is amazing. He’ll be on the Olympic stage in a matter of weeks. Hajime had heard Oikawa laughing in the kitchen, prattling off to a semicircle that had formed around him, and didn’t have to guess at the topic.

And the news of it is months-old at this point, but Hajime had heard it only peripherally, weeks after it happened, back in May. Makki and Mattsun had both assumed that he’d already heard it from Oikawa himself: _Hey, since Oikawa’s playing for Argentina and all—_

Moments like that, where he could have said something, and thought it easier not to. It would have been simple: _I actually had no clue he made the team. We don’t talk that much anymore._ It’s utterly stupid now. How many moments like those has he had? They seem to stack on top of one another, now, like a tower of stupidity, a lit-up Tokyo skyscraper of the hundreds of places he could have taken an out, and didn’t. 

Oikawa had switched passports to do it. Not unheard of, and no great surprise to anyone anymore, since his two years in Argentina had turned to three, and his three into four, into five, into a sort of perpetuity that no longer seemed to require an explanation. In their stilted phone conversations, he’d caught glimpses of why. Friends, always tugging at Oikawa’s sleeve, house parties, roomates, Spanish fluency, the Argentinean wine, the allure of a spot on the Olympic stage. Home, becoming situated elsewhere. No longer, _when are you moving back to Japan,_ but _when’s your next visit?_

He can’t truly hate him for it. Hating him for it never would have come into question if not for this nightmare, and now it only picks weakly in his gut. And maybe that’s only because because Oikawa had seemed to slide right into the evening like it was nothing. Show up in his Argentinean shirt, stare at Hajime like a deer in headlights, but then slink off into the kitchen and begin laughing with Kunimi and Kindaichi like nothing was wrong. Maybe nothing is wrong. Hajime sets down his empty glass on the railing. The Olympian in the room. Maybe, for him, nothing is wrong.

And, God, a week ago, he probably would have said that nothing was wrong, too.

A tap on the door. Hajime jerks his head around.

Oikawa is there. Hajime’s stomach drops. He is sudden, and impossibly vivid, and outlined against the backdrop of an emptied-out living room. Hajime’s eyes dart away from him. The party is over. Everyone slipped out when he wasn’t looking, and Kyoutani is the only one left, at the far wall, fiddling with the sound system.

How long has he been out here?

Oikawa waves, and if he sees the startled look on Hajime’s face, he pretends not to. He opens the door without waiting for a response, and in the next second he’s at the bannister beside him.

The space seems to warp around him, grow wider and smaller at once. When he leans against the railing and says nothing, Hajime lets himself study the side of his face, the set of his shoulders, solid, unflinching. Olympian. The thought gives Hajime vertigo. Oikawa huffs out a single breath, looks down a dozen stories into the glow-pool of traffic. It shines back, illuminating his face.

“Fucking hot out here.”

Hajime barks out a laugh, it’s that startling. Neither of them are immune to the sheer absurdity of the situation. Beneath the glacial terror there’s almost a solidarity to it, standing together on the silent balcony after everyone else has already left, their backs to the empty apartment. Both of them were dragged into that room and faced with the other when they weren’t ready, and here they are, now, deciding that they’re going to do it on their own terms. Hajime decides to try to not be scared. What’s Oikawa going to do, bite him? There’s no one here to watch; if they do have the falling-out they never got around to and he flies over the bannister, no direct evidence.

“Not my smartest move. Maybe I could have hidden in the fridge.”

And that gets Oikawa to laugh. There’s a moment where they both risk looking at each other, and Hajime gets to watch his own wonder, and fear, mirrored on someone else’s features. Oikawa’s smiling face is a time capsule, a memory so real it’s unreality. He’s not actually taller, he just seems it, something about the ruddy sun spots on his cheeks and his grown-up haircut.

Or maybe it’s just the Argentinean national team shirt. In the dim, the blue could be mistaken for Seijou teal. Or the cobalt of Kitagawa Daiichi. Maybe that’s Oikawa’s cosmic trajectory, Hajime thinks—forever graduating from one shade of blue into the next.

Oikawa opens his mouth then, as if about to say something, but nothing comes.

“Makki didn’t give you too hard of a time, right?” Hajime relieves him.

Whatever fear had flashed across Oikawa’s face vanishes. A rueful smile. “Not terrible. He tried to apologize about a dozen times. I think we scared them pretty bad.”

 _I think we scared each other pretty bad._ “I didn’t miss anything too interesting in there, right?”

Oikawa feigns thoughtfulness, and there it is again, a glimmer of the theatrics he put on constantly in high school. It looks no less silly on him as a man. “Kindaichi and Watari got Kunimi to do a round of tequila, so.” His face screws up. “I brought Argentinean wine. Not as interesting. They wouldn’t do shots of it with me, God knows why.”

Hajime smiles despite himself. They could do this for hours, he knows, passing conversation back and forth like a ball, never really saying anything. They got good at it, in the five years between that life and this one. He would ask about the wine, and then Oikawa would regale some tale about the bar where he first tried it, and Hajime would watch and listen and nod along and try not to grimace at the fact that he knows none of these names and none of these places, and that Oikawa is smiling at the memory of something he will never see. Will never be able to share with him, no matter how hard he tries.

Oikawa’s watching him, waiting for his next stage direction; Hajime grabs the steering wheel and yanks it the opposite way. Into oncoming traffic. “You’re in town for the Olympics.”

Oikawa blinks. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t know,” Hajime begins sedately, and maybe it’s the sake in him. He has to inhale and start the sentence over. “I didn’t know you made the team ‘till May. Found out from Makki. Over the phone. I pretended I knew already.”

Oikawa turns away, looks out over the pitch-dark shapes of Tokyo, like it’s suddenly too much. Hajime doesn’t mean to sound accusatory; he’s pretty sure it came out that way anyways. It’s another absurdity, really, _in town_ for something as grand, as world-altering as the Olympics. Hajime never would have imagined himself saying it that way. He never would have imagined it that way it happened that May, either, hearing about his best friend’s dream a month after it was fulfilled, and only on accident. Shell-shock over the phone, as Makki mentioned it to him offhand. _Yeah, he’s Argentina’s starting setter._

“I’m not just here for the Olympics, actually,” Oikawa says, and it’s an odd deflection. He’s leaning over the railing, and for a moment he seems just utterly Argentinean, tanned and muscled, the flag on his shirt sleeve. Hajime expects him to be mad; to kick back at the insinuation of blame, but his voice is quiet. “The plan is to stay here, once the games are over.”

“What?”

Oikawa glances up, smiles weakly. “Gotta move back home sometime.”

Hajime just stares. The career he thought would never end, the years that snowballed into half a decade, into citizenship, into the collective assumption that that was what Oikawa was, now, Spanish-speaking and sun-kissed. That he would never return to shore.

“That’s what I came out here to tell you, actually. I don’t know if you’re in the area, or if they ever let you out of that lab, but—” Oikawa begins digging in his pocket, and produces a crumpled sticky-note. “Got a Japanese SIM card again. Passport comes later, I’ve got business to take care of on the court first, but—” he holds it out. “Lost all my contacts.”

Hajime takes it unsteadily. A shitty, half-folded, fuschia pink olive branch. It’s Oikawa’s handwriting, the rushed, loopy, near-illegible scrawl that has stayed frozen in time since they were in fifth grade. But he can read it. Hajime swallows hard; of course he can read it.

“Thanks,” he says dumbly, and when he glances up he’s unprepared for the expression on Oikawa’s face. 

“They told me it was a surprise party for Yahaba. Like they told you. Something told me you might be here, though, seemed like the kind of thing they would try to do for us, so I thought—” He gestures feebly at the post-it in Hajime’s hands, falters for a moment. His practiced words seem to run out. Eventually, he smiles. “Since we’re on the same continent again, and all.”

Hajime’s skin is hot static. “Yeah,” he says, and he feels like he’s coming undone at the edges. Oikawa’s face is a blur, ancient, and bright. “Yeah.”

Oikawa excuses himself, then, something about an early wake-up that Hajime doesn’t really hear, and in the next second he’s vanished through the glass doors. Gone as quickly as he came.

Hajime holds up the sticky note against the pitch-dark backdrop of midsummer Tokyo. It flutters a little bit, and the background blurs, and the whole world goes silent around him. In seconds, he has the numbers memorized.

Just so that they can’t slip away again.

  
  


<<<

  
  


When Oikawa was in high school, he wore the same Disneyland Tokyo t-shirt to bed every night. By their third year he had worn and washed it enough times that it was threadbare all over and the logo was a bleach-white ghost of itself, and the collar sagged low over his collarbones. It was one of a hundred things he wouldn’t hear Hajime’s opinion about. That, and his taste in sci-fi novels, and his preference for milk bread— _eat a vegetable, shittykawa_ —and how late he stayed at the gym to practice. The shirt was the way he brandished his stubbornness. He’d show up to their impromptu sleepovers with it stuffed in his bag and change into it as soon as possible and then turn to Hajime, beaming, a wordless challenge to poke fun at it.

Hajime has a vague memory of himself, laying sprawled out on his bedroom floor, watching Oikawa pull it over his head for the hundredth time and deciding to bite. _Are you ever going to get a different shirt, Oikawa?_

A megawatt grin. _No._

It was months later that it dawned on Hajime what the shirt was. His mother was cleaning out one of their closets, digging out bins of old schoolwork and clothes, and with it, a dozen random souveniers from Disneyland Tokyo. Among them, tucked between two binders and a plastic light-up Buzz Lightyear, was a Disneyland Tokyo shirt.

Hajime had unfurled it and stared, and understood only after several long moments. It was a shirt identical to Oikawa’s, only that this one was near-unrecognisable in its unworn, unwashed state, the logo still plasticky and saturated. They’d gotten matching ones, when they went together in middle school. Hajime had forgotten—Oikawa hadn’t.

Once Hajime saw it in the shirt, he began to see it everywhere, in everything Oikawa did. The space documentaries that he watched over and over again and never grew tired of, even when the CDs began to skip. The Super Sentai pen he always kept in his binder, the only thing he would take notes with, even when the cap fell off and it wouldn’t click anymore. The same brand of milk bread, even when the grocery store stopped carrying it and he had to go the town over. The jump serves, the jump serves. Even after he twisted his knee. The jump serves.

Even after he twisted his knee for the second time, in their first year, badly, and he was on the court gasping in Hajime’s arms, and their coach pulled him out of practice and his doctor put him in a brace—the jump serves.

Oikawa loved things to the point of destruction. His own destruction, sometimes. He would wear shirts until they were threadbare and watch the same movies until he had them memorized and talk to the same person every day until their lives contained nothing, nothing else, and he would stay at the gym and drive balls into the floor until the sun was gone and the stars were his only witness, and would let nothing stop him, even his own body slowly coming apart. Hajime would look at him, and that brilliant smile, and feel like he was holding a bomb in his hands.

Mention of Jose Blanco came towards the end of their third year. It was another one of those memories that Oikawa remembered so much better than Hajime did: the two of them as kids, whiteknuckling the railing at the exhibition match between Argentina and Japan, Oikawa chubby-cheeked, slack-jawed in wonder, Hajime asking himself what was so cool about a setter who only got switched in halfway through the third set.

A starry-eyed Oikawa explained it to him later, after he got that godforsaken jockstrap signed, his hands splayed out in the air: _He got the hitters to do so much better. You don’t even notice him, but he’s why they won the whole game!_

So it wasn’t a great surprise, eight years later, when Oikawa came barreling through Hajime’s back door, telling him that he met Jose Blanco again. They were third-years. He was wild-haired, wide-eyed, sloppily dressed in a way that was rare for him, with one hoodie string tucked in and the other frayed where he’d been chewing on it. Oikawa had figured out that he was stunning and that girls liked him sometime during middle school; this image of him, dressed like he was when no one was looking, was a time capsule from the years before that. His voice, breathless: “ _Iwa-chan. I met Jose Blanco_.”

This was within the first few weeks after they’d lost in the preliminaries to Karasuno, the thin and hazy stretch of time of which Hajime can remember little. He remembers mostly Oikawa, who had suddenly been too small for his own body, unmoored, the hard-won strength in his limbs a useless reminder of where he was not headed. It had been excruciating to watch him, full-grown and at the fullest flush of his skill, falling from the tower he’d built himself, to the point where Hajime’s own pain was an afterthought. He’d said he wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue volleyball at all, and Hajime had tried to gently coax him away from that thought, a bandage he’d slapped on a pride so wounded he didn’t know what to do with it. There was, ultimately, no one who could make it better, no matter how desperately Hajime wanted to.

This was also around the time when Hajime decided where he was going to college. A sports science program in California, at UC Irvine. It was the time of year where third years’ plans slowly crystalized, where conversations that did not begin with discussion of college always arrived there eventually, and Oikawa ducked out when they did. Hajime had decided, a while ago, that proximity to volleyball was going to be enough. He was not the one slamming serves over a net into the night, he was the one telling that guy to go home.

And Oikawa had applied there, too, and gotten in. It was obvious at the time, like muscle memory, the two of them doing things together. _Just don’t make Irvine the only place you apply, shittykawa._ And he hadn’t—there were places in Tokyo, in Nagasaki, acceptance letters received and opened and left on his dining room table.

That was before they last to Karasuno; things had only unraveled further since then, and college had only drifted further from Oikawa’s mind. He hadn’t sent in any commitment letters yet. Hajime had.

“I met Jose Blanco.” Oikawa was breathless, stepping into Hajime’s living room, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. It was late in the afternoon; they’d gotten out of class hours ago, would have just gotten out of practice, if they’d had practice. “Irihata said he was in the area for a conference. I got to talk to him.”

And Hajime, cross-legged on his floor, had set down his homework and smiled for him. He hadn’t seen Oikawa so energized since they lost; he floated around school, eyes half-lidded, sheltering his pride the way animals hide injured limbs. Maybe that’s what it took, Hajime thought, brushing elbows with a childhood idol. “Did he tell you you’re stupid for wanting to quit volleyball?”

Oikawa pulled a face that told Hajime he was trying not to smile. They’d begun joking about it, gently, Hajime studying his reactions carefully each time. _Don’t go lost on me._

“He told me that—” Oikawa stopped, sat on the floor, entangled his legs with Hajime’s. His skin was flushed-hot, his fingers tapping against Hajime’s leg. His eyes searched the floor. 

“Told you that I was right? That it’s a stupid idea to quit?” It was easier on him this way, when Hajime framed it as a petty argument, and not a matter of lifelong dreams. Hajime leaned back until his head rested on the couch, considered the ceiling, took away the pressure of his gaze. “Interesting.”

Oikawa took a long breath in, and exhaled slowly. Maybe the initial rush had worn away, Hajime thought. He stared at the ceiling fan and tried to picture the look on Oikawa’s face, his fine eyebrows pinched, his lips twisted into a frown, tried to feel the thoughts beneath his skin before he let him out. It had been a very bad three weeks. To have him practically in his lap here, talking about it, was a miracle. No sudden movements.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Oikawa said. It was quiet, like a secret, even though no one else was in the room. “I shouldn’t be surprised that something like this happened. Is what he said.”

Hajime wanted to jerk his head down and stare at him, but he stopped himself. It was the most candid Oikawa had been since it happened. “What do you mean?” He forced his voice steady.

“That there’s someone luckier than me. Roadblocks. Setbacks, I guess.”

Hajime chewed on the thought; Oikawa was dancing around it. “He said that you shouldn’t be surprised that we lost?” he asked. _We_ was easier than _you,_ even if they both knew who felt it more.

“Yeah.” A silence. “He asked me if I think I’m at the peak of my skill.”

Hajime’s head jerked up of its own accord. Oikawa stared back at him, moony-eyed, his own sorrow sketched so plainly across his face. So rarely was he so open, so readable. It was easy to picture Jose Blanco, silver-haired, wisened with age, seeing Oikawa clearly enough to ask questions like this.

Hajime dug his heels in. “Well, are you?” _Tell me no._

Oikawa’s face contorted. He never liked this, staring things down directly and naming them. There was always some glittering deflection at the ready; Hajime watched as he set it down, this time. “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so either,” Hajime said.

He had learned, in all his years with Oikawa, to tell when he still had something left to say. Now was one of those times, with Oikawa’s cheek turned to him, his gaze thrown as far across the room as it would go. 

“Spit it out, shittykawa.”

“He said he would help me, if I wanted to take a shot at the Argentinean league.”

Hajime went still. Oikawa’s eyes flicked to him and held him pinned there, searching his reaction. 

They both knew what this would mean. The understanding somehow drew the air taut, a third presence in the in the room. Oikawa had jokingly flirted with the idea of going abroad before. _Don’t you think I’d fit right in in the Italian league, Iwa-chan?_ But that, like every other glitteringly ironic quip of his, hid a grain of truth. Hajime had seen it all along, under the surface, the lingering gleam in his eye whenever he talked about it. Maybe he should have said something sooner, sober enough to shock him, like: _Yeah, shittykawa, you actually would. You should go for it._

Because now Oikawa presented it flinchingly, like he was ready for Hajime to balk at him. It had been weeks since Oikawa had said anything that would suggest he had any interest in playing more volleyball, and here he was again, wounded, cautiously owning up to his desires, waiting to be beaten back again. Something deep within Hajime ached.

“Actually,” Hajime began. They both knew what going to Argentina would mean; it didn’t need to be said. Hajime knew that he was holding something very fragile in his hands. A tipping point. He spoke gently, as if touching a fresh bruise: “I think that would be really cool, Oikawa. Do you want to?”

Something in Oikawa’s expression released. He turned away again, and Hajime was presented with his cheek, and his averted gaze. He watched his breath enter and leave him. _Yes,_ he thought, _I know the answer is yes._ Their legs were entangled, their skin pressed together, Hajime thought could feel the word there, before it was spoken.

“I think so,” Oikawa said finally, and he was seven years old again, worrying a glance in Hajime’s direction, hoping to find a smile on his face. “I think, yeah.”

Hajime gave him the smile he was looking for. He would give him that smile again and again, every day of their lives, as many times as he wanted it.

“Then I think you should do it, shittykawa.”

  
  


He should have insisted, then. He should have made him commit, in that moment. Maybe things would have been easier.

  
  


<<<

  
  


“Ueno,” Hajime says. “Do you have any clue where that shirt is?”

“Huh?” Ueno’s sprawled out on the couch, a mug of tea in his fist, his phone glued to his face. Watching a _Bundesliga_ match, probably. What did he say it was earlier, Dortmund against Munich? He is a vegetable whose eyes don’t move away from the screen. “How am I supposed to know what the hell shirt you’re talking about?”

It’s 8 P.M. in Osaka, and Hajime’s on the floor of their apartment, frowning at a blue button-down. He’s built a semicircle around himself of stacks of jeans and shirts, all of them extracted from their single filing cabinet, which sits crooked and half-empty behind him. It was a gift from professor Utsui, his cheeky way of telling them that they were disorganized messes and needed to keep their papers in order.

Professor Utsui was right. They don't use it to keep their papers in order; like idiots, they use it to store their clothes. Ueno and Hajime’s apartment in Irvine had been in dire need of storage space, and the one they’re renting for the summer in Osaka is no better. Seven weeks into their internship, and they’re only halfway unpacked. _Mutual disablers,_ Utsui had called them. Hajime smiles whenever he thinks about it.

“The one, the—” Hajime paws through a stack of t-shirts, the ones Americans love to hand out for free at events, clubs, fun-runs, an intricate backlog of his undergraduate recreation. “It’s white. Kinda old. From 2007. I brought it with me from home, freshman year.” He flips over a pair of jeans, scowls. “Disneyland Tokyo?”

Ueno makes a face, and ceremoniously slides off the couch onto the floor beside him. An arm is thrown around Hajime’s shoulders, and his phone is tossed onto the carpet, soccer announcers’ voices still squeaking out of the speakers. He begins to study Hajime’s laundry with him. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen you wear anything like that, what the hell do you need it for now?” 

“I dunno, I. . .” But Hajime knows he’ll get him if he tries to deflect. Ueno’s known him for five years and lived with him for three, a soccer-player-turned-sports-scientist from his program in Irvine, one of the few others from Japan, a friend upon arrival. They’d applied for the same research internship in Osaka last year, both gotten in, and decided to go from living in Irvine together to living in Osaka together. The kind of relationship that leaves fingerprints on the whole rest of your life. “I, uh, I’m seeing someone soon, and it would be— It’s relevant.” He knows that he’s done for as soon as it comes out of his mouth.

Ueno snorts, and Hajime knows he’s staring, but he refuses to meet his gaze. “What kind of friend of yours wants to see you in a fucking Disneyland Tokyo shirt from 2007?”

Hajime’s face screws up. It sounds ridiculous, put like that. “I’m not going to _wear_ it, it’s just something I want to find.”

Ueno is silent. He hesitates for a moment, and then grabs a shirt out of Hajime’s hand, frowns at it himself. “I really don’t think you’re gonna find it in here, dude. Ir’s probably gone. You never wore it, anyways.” He tosses it to the side carelessly; Hajime can practically hear the question forming in his head. “Do I know this guy?”

Hajime presses his lips together. Ueno’s arm around his shoulders is suddenly very heavy. “‘Kawa,” he says, like cutting a syllable off will help.

“Huh?”

“Oikawa.” Hajime leans back so they can make eye contact. “Argentina.” His stomach swoops.

“What?” Ueno’s eyes widen, and his face goes slack with shock. “He’s back?”

Hajime wants to laugh. It’s like Makki gawking at him in the kitchen: _It’s that bad?_ The things he’s managed to hide from people.

“Yeah, he’s, ah—” Hajime pushes Ueno’s hand away and puts down the t-shirt, slips out from under his arm, and stands to begin yanking open the drawers in their filing cabinet, like the gravity of it needs space to occupy. He tries to formulate an explanation, paging through layer after layer of shirts, and finds himself smiling. _He’s here for the Olympics._ He hasn’t talked to Ueno about Oikawa in months, something like that would sound ridiculous.

But isn’t that what this is? Ridiculous? Hajime lets himself smile. “Yeah, he made it onto the Argentinean Olympic team for indoor. He’s here for the games.”

“ _What?_ You’re fucking with me.”

And Hajime laughs, and meets Ueno’s wide-eyed gaze with a smile. His own reaction, two months late. “I’m not, though. I know. It’s crazy.”

“But I thought you guys—” Hajime watches the thought cross Ueno’s mind, watches him stop himself.

Hajime’s smile drops. “Yeah, we did,” he says, if only to prevent him from saying the rest of it. _We did._ He lets it sit for a moment.

“But I ran into him at a party last weekend,” Hajime continues, “and he, well—” _He gave me his number and then invited me to watch the Argentinean national team practice. The shirt is just— I just want to see it._

Hajime’s entire face stings, the feeling striking him all at once. It gives him vertigo, even thinking about saying it, and he lets himself chicken out. “Well, we made plans. It’ll be nice to see him again,” he says mildly. “Shirt doesn’t actually matter.”

Ueno is silent for a long time. “It’ll be nice. Do you think so?” he asks. The question is quiet and thoughtful in a way his questions so rarely are; it makes Hajime’s head jerk towards him.

It’s a question he’s asked himself, a dozen times. Staring Ueno in the eyes, now, he’s forced to confront it again. And it’s big this time, like God is watching, or Oikawa, or something.

“Yeah, I think it’ll be nice,” he says, and he means it.

  
  


They find the shirt thirty minutes later, wedged and half-crumpled in the back of the bottom drawer. _Sure seems like you cared about this thing, huh, Hajime._ The joke is that he does. Still in perfect condition, untouched by time, the logo shiny and bright and folded over itself only a little bit. A pristine time capsule.

Ueno laughs at him, when he sees Hajime going to bed in it that night, and Hajime can only smile, because not even Ueno knows.

  
  


<<<

  
  


Oikawa [1:26]

it’s the south gym

use the entrance by the parking garage

if the lady at the front desk gives you a hard time tell her you know oikawa tooru:)

Me [1:29]

She didn’t give me a hard time.

Oikawa [1:30]

good!!

And then a string of volleyball emojis. They’re fifteen again, and Oikawa is blowing up his phone, and Hajime is smiling all the way down the hallway of the south building of Tokyo’s Ariake Arena. It’s a Monday, and he’d gotten Ueno to cover an entire afternoon at the lab for him, hadn’t even really had to work for it, something like: _Oh, for an Olympian, sure,_ and a narrowly-dodged swipe at Hajime’s head. Hajime had left work half an hour early, just to be safe, and waited in his car in the parking garage for fifteen minutes, staring out over the bay and seeing nothing. The arena in his rear-view mirror was a beautiful work of glass, grand and glistening, suddenly the most Olympian thing he’d ever laid eyes on. Of course Oikawa was here, he’d thought without an ounce of irony. Something in his chest had keened. Of course.

They’d been texting for only a few days. Hajime jumped each time his phone went off. It felt like playing a very precarious game of chess, conversation launched back and forth like a hot coal, each of them afraid to respond too soon or too late. The initial invitation two days ago had been cautious to the point of formality. The games began in two weeks; his team had the arena booked for practice on Monday, Oikawa’d explained, and bringing along friends and family to watch wasn’t expressly forbidden, which meant that his teammates did it all the time. It was out of the blue:

_i just thought you might want to see one of our practices. i know you have work, so if you can’t make it, that’s totally cool_

Hajime had stood in the lab and stared at his phone, dumbstruck, and pushed against the sudden swooping feeling in his gut. It might have been the least _Oikawa Tooru_ text message ever sent, wishy-washy in a way that Oikawa had never been with him before, none of the cocksure theatrics of their previous lifetime. But maybe that’s where they were at, he’d thought, rendered stiff by the sheer number of years, afraid to make any sudden movements. He’d sent an equally discreet response after drafting it a dozen times, determined to betray exactly none of the swelling excitement in his chest. _Yeah, actually, I’d like to come._

It’s a laughably unfamiliar way to speak to him, but none of that seems to matter, now, because he’s made it through the automatic doors of Ariake Arena and past the friendly woman at the desk who hadn’t questioned him at all, and in seconds the gaping maw of the arena’s center is open before him, a blue-linoleum sea beneath a fluorescent sky. It _smells_ like volleyball, fresh rubber against floor, and for a second the gap of years is closed and he is weightless. Of course Oikawa is here.

The Argentinean team is a huddle of baby blue gathered in a far corner of the court, and he wanders into the stands, a few rows up, where he hopes he’s not too visible. The arena is polished-bright, seats of orange plastic creaking under their own newness. His gaze wanders, and then he double-takes at the sight of another person, sitting at the very end of the row. A woman with a dark ponytail, waving at him.

“One of the reporters?” she asks, in perfect English, when he approaches.

If California granted him one thing, it was this. She must be Argentinean, he realizes, the girlfriend or sister of one of Oikawa’s teammates. She’s blithely comfortable, a handbag strewn across the seat beside her, legs crossed loosely at the ankle, like she’s been here before. “No,” he says, and he feels himself smile as he sits. It’s a relief not to be the only onlooker. “Er, a friend. Just here to watch their practice.”

“Ah.” Her gaze lingers on him. Not unfriendly, only gauging. Gold baubles swing from her ears. “I don’t believe I’ve met you before. A friend of which one?”

“The setter,” he says, and it’s only in the moment after that he realizes she must know the players by name.

“Oikawa?” She beams. “He told us he was expecting someone today. You must be Iwaizumi.”

Hajime shuts his mouth, so he doesn’t gawk. “Yeah,” he says, a couple seconds late. _He told us he was expecting someone today._

“I’m Elena.” She seems to offer it as a sort of explanation, alongside a smile. When she holds out her hand he shakes it. “I’m Estrada’s wife. Pleasure to meet you.”

 _Estrada._ It’s a name he’s heard before, he thinks, and when she sees the confused look on his face and goes on to explain that Estrada’s the captain, this rings true. She comes to almost all of their practices, she tells him, and the only expectation for visitors is that they don’t take any photos or videos. She’s friendly and talkative in the open way of most Americans, which is one of the hundred things he misses about California, and she goes on to tell him about the rest of the roster and the coaches, their practice schedule, when their first games are.

“Did Oikawa not tell you when their games are?” She arrives there finally, as they’re watching the team do receive warmups, she’s telling him their game schedule, and Hajime is putting the dates and times in his phone’s calendar.

Hajime grimaces for a moment. “Er, no,” he says, and he tries to ignore the surprise on her face. “I’m from out of town. Didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it up for the games.” It’s a half-truth.

“Oh,” she says. “Well, do you plan on coming? Their first match is against Germany.”

Hajime looks up, across the court, where the team is splitting off into groups to scrimmage. His thumb hovers over the part of his phone’s calendar where the first match is listed: _Thursday, August 4, 2020, 2:00 P.M., Ariake Arena._ He can see the number 3 on the back of Oikawa’s jersey flashing through the grid of the net. Oikawa had glanced and waved at him earlier, while the team was doing pass drills, his smile like a beacon shot across the whole room. It had given him vertigo.

Hell, Ueno can probably cover him at the lab for another afternoon.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’ll make it.”

  
  


The Argentinean national team is like a well-conducted orchestra. It’s been so long since Hajime got to watch world-class volleyball up close, even just a practice. The last time was probably sometime before he moved to California, he realizes; he got to crush his friends in pick-up games during undergrad, but the sport was so small in the US, and professional matches weren’t anything like this.

 _Carlos told me that the whole team seemed to change once Oikawa joined them,_ Elena tells him, after a particularly long rally. Hajime can see it. The side of the net Oikawa is on is the site of acrobatics, hitters reaching for spikes Hajime would have thought impossible until they’ve struck them. Oikawa wrists flash, and the ball is on the other side of the court, and the whistle blows, and they’re shouting in Spanish as they crowd around Oikawa to smack him between the shoulderblades. His team loves him. He laughs, and says something Hajime can’t understand, and the sheer absurdity of it makes him smile. He’s a different shade than Seijou teal, now, but blue. Always blue.

And as the practice goes on, Hajime can see nothing but him, but he knows another spectator might not. He quietly sets up shot after shot that makes his hitters look like stars. His side of the net wins the first round, and then the next. _He’s like Jose Blanco_ , Hajime realizes, the way he steers the whole game silently, pulling strings in the background. Hajime can’t help but remember the starry-eyed boy he knew, his hands splayed out in the air, reaching for the world itself: _He got the hitters to do so much better. You don’t even notice him, but he’s why they won the whole game!_

Something within him aches.

And, God, he thinks, maybe the distance between them has never been more obvious than in this moment, with him on the sidelines, Oikawa speaking a foreign language in a foreign jersey in an Olympic arena in front of him. Maybe he’s never stared it so squarely in the face. And it should hurt, he thinks from some distant place, it really ought to hurt, but Oikawa glances at him through the net for the dozenth time, and he gets another one of those light-beam smiles, and the world is a singular hum. 

“He was young,” Elena says, “When Carlos met him.” It’s late afternoon and they’re in the team’s final scrimmage now, bearded faces sweat-soaked, players leaning over their knees. Oikawa’s side of the court has won all but one of them. He leaps, now, and sends a toss flying to the back of the court. A hitter slams the ball into the floor. The whistle blows. 23-20.

Hajime jerks his head towards her. “Hm?” She’s chatted with him the whole time, telling him about this player and that, and he’s let himself sit back and put together an image of their national team, piece by piece. It’s nice to speak English again. _Oikawa’s not the only one who went abroad._

“Oikawa, I mean.” She smiles at him. “Carlos met him in the Argentinean league the year after he moved.”

“Oh?” Hajime goes still, suddenly, under her gaze. There’s something she wants to say. “Did he?”

She nods, and there’s a quiet knowingness to it. It’s odd to speak to someone who has seen the years in-between, accessed the only version of Oikawa that he hasn’t. “My husband was on a team from Buenos Aires, but we moved to San Juan that year. Oikawa was on that team. He said he’s never seen someone work so hard. Or—” She laughs. “Learn Spanish so quickly.”

Fondness, sudden to the point of nausea. “Oh, that’s him.”

She’s watching him, and she nods again. “I met Oikawa later that year, too. He wanted more than anything to make it to the Olympic games. And it was surprising, a nineteen-year-old from a foreign country, so dead-set on something so lofty and difficult. So willing to learn the language. To trade passports to play for Argentina, even.”

She lets that hang, and Hajime eventually hums in acknowledgement. His face is beginning to sting.

“And it wasn’t Rio he cared about, he never talked about Rio. It was always Tokyo.”

The stinging has spread to his neck. Hajime can only nod.

She’s watching him still, the slightest smile on her face. “Carlos always wondered why. I did too. Tokyo’s in his home country, after all. I never knew why he wanted to work so hard in Argentina, just to come home. For a while we didn’t understand. What did he have to prove?”

Hajime is silent.

“But—I think I understand now.” She takes a breath in. “It’s been a while since you’ve seen your friend, right?”

Hajime, from a great distance, meets her gaze and nods. 

She smiles softly, and nods back, and pulls her gaze to the floor. Hajime is static, suspended in air. Somewhere far away, a whistle blows, and players begin spilling off the court.

“I’m glad you’re here, Iwaizumi,” she says. “Today wasn’t the first time he talked about you.”

  
  


Oikawa finds them minutes later. _Did’ya enjoy watching us practice, Iwa-chan?_ He drags Hajime off the stands and begins introducing him to everyone, and Hajime is still static, suspended in air. It’s so familiar of Oikawa, the way he grabs him by the wrist, throws an arm around his shoulders, presents him to his teammates as _my favorite vice-captain,_ like this isn’t the second in-person interaction they’ve had in five years; it’s convincing enough that he wonders for a second if everything’s normal. He smiles genuinely and shakes one hand after another, blue-clad men taller and tanner and more bearded than him, asking Oikawa questions in Spanish over his head. It’s one long freefall, one long vertigo loop. Oikawa’s light-beam smile up close. His arm around his shoulders like a firebrand. He meets the coach, he’s pretty sure, a short man with another beard who smiles at Oikawa brightly. _So you’re Oikawa’s friend from high school? We like him._

Hajime, dumb with shock, in his own head: _I like him too._

The team clears out eventually, and everyone disappears into the locker room, and he and Oikawa linger in the cool vastness of the stadium while the net gets taken down. Oikawa’s sitting on the bench, legs crossed at the ankle, cheerfully chatting away about their schedule leading up to the Games. “Our dorms in the Olympic Village are, like, way bigger than. . .”

Hajime tries to listen. But he’s elsewhere, a thousand miles and a couple years away, picturing Oikawa at Elena’s dinner table, skinnier and pale with youth, telling them that he wants to go to the Tokyo Olympics. Biking through Sao Paolo, flying from practice to practice, to the gym, to bed, to practice, to practice again, Tokyo a monolith on the horizon— 

_Today wasn’t the first time he talked about you._

All the times Hajime had thought he’d been missing from the picture.

He stares at Oikawa’s sky-blue uniform shirt and tries to get his vision to focus. Oikawa is saying something about one of his teammates. Hajime needs to go soon, he knows, get back to Osaka in time to begin catching up on the work he’s missed, but— 

“Iwaizumi?” Oikawa’s waving a hand at him, eyebrows raised, smile slipping. “Zoned out?”

The expanse of the arena snaps into focus around him. It’s so large, he thinks helplessly, so freshly-minted, the linoleum so new that it squeaks when he resettles his weight. Oikawa’s presence expands to fill the space. It’s not difficult to imagine him here two weeks from now, beaming beneath a dozen cameras, thousands of pairs of eyes. And, God— Oikawa’s being so familiar with him, so eager, filling Hajime’s stunned silences, introducing him to each one of his teammates, constantly searching his face.

_He wanted to work so hard in Argentina, just to come home._

“Iwaizumi?” Oikawa’s face has fallen.

“What? Yeah.” Hajime blinks at him. The stadium snaps into focus again. He can only hear his own heartbeat. “Sorry. Zoned out.”

Oikawa is silent on the bench, watching him. That gaze dissolves the distance of years, and he’s five years old, and he’s fifteen, and he’s twenty-five. _Just to come home._ The sight of him is blurry. Oikawa is frowning. He has to do something. Oikawa starts talking again: “Iwaizumi, are you—”

“Oikawa.” Hajime cuts him off, seized by the stinging in his gut. Who is he, now, if he doesn’t make up for this? “I’m driving up to Sendai this weekend. To visit my mom.”

Oikawa blinks. “Huh?”

“She would love to see you.” Vertigo, like driving off a cliff: “Come up with me.”

A hand, outstretched, over the Sonora, Yucatan, Panama, the Andes. The terror of it doesn’t matter. All the times they hung up, or Hajime let the phone ring out, or didn’t call at all. Maybe those won’t matter either, if they get this one right.

Oikawa’s eyes, wide with shock.

_It’s my turn to surprise you._

“Sure. Yeah.” Wide with hope. “Of course.”


	2. II

The first time Hajime kissed him, they were both eighteen. That it took him that long was one of a dozen miracles. Tooru’s backyard, high summer, pitch-dark nighttime, the kind of air that’s like the bottom of a swimming pool, so sweet with humidity that everyone floats a little. Tooru most of all, splayed out in a hammock, breathing up into the mica-spangle of the sky. Peaceful, for the first time in what felt like years.

It was three weeks after their loss to Karasuno. The period of time that was one blur of delirium, Tooru’s shuttered expression, outright refusal to set foot in a gym or touch a volleyball. Punctuated only by his meeting with Jose Blanco, and the one candid conversation he’d had with Hajime since. _I think I wanna try the Argentinean League._ That was when Hajime knew he was headed towards healing. They would part, but Tooru would start playing again, be reminded of himself, and be fine.

That was the only reason Hajime let himself do it.

It was their last week of high school. Graduation like approaching a cliff. Hajime had been half-listening to Tooru for the past thirty minutes, sitting in the dampness of the grass while Tooru floated in the hammock above him, Hajime tugging on his foot to keep him swaying. It was one of a hundred summer evenings spent here. Tooru was chatting away about one of their teachers, voice lilting: _Did I tell you? I think Nomura-san hates me, Iwa-chan. She still hasn’t graded my final paper._

And Hajime wouldn’t say it, but it was a relief to hear him talking about stuff like this, whole enough again to get caught up in little irrelevancies.

_Do you think she wants to fail me? We’re graduating in a week. Maybe I’ll do another year, Iwa-chan. Sendai will never see the last of me._

They were graduating in a week.

Hajime held Tooru’s foot still, and the hammock stopped swaying.

It was almost funny. He had always imagined it as some grand occasion. Fireworks in the background, a loud, vibrant awakening, Tooru rushing into his open arms, something from a summer blockbuster. But Hajime sat there in the damp dark grass and thought: maybe it was always going to happen this way for them. A quiet night, no fireworks, no emergency, just the realization that it was time. They were done waiting. _We’re graduating in a week._

Hajime stood up, and there was Tooru, staring at him from the hammock. He was so placid, somehow, all of him malleable, no shock on his face, only gentle amusement. _Huh?_ A cat that shows you its underbelly. Like there was nothing Hajime could do to surprise him. Or hurt him. _Iwa-chan?_

He was wrong, Hajime would later realize.

The hammock dipped beneath Hajime’s knees. Tooru was laying in it sideways, and for a second it swung beneath them, until Tooru steadied them against the ground with his feet. Hajime planted a hand on either side of his head, and suddenly Tooru’s face was so bright, so bright, and he was laughing as he said something, but Hajime couldn’t hear him. Something like: _Oh, so we're doing this now._

They could just choose, all along, to do this. They didn’t have to wait. It was like suddenly remembering something you’d been trying to recall for a decade, so obvious it leaves you stupid. There was nothing stopping them. They didn’t need fireworks. It was laughable. They could just _choose._

Hajime leaned in. A moment he had imagined so many times that it felt like a memory.

His mouth was so warm. His hands, too, which reached for Hajime’s jaw, his hair, as he laughed against him. Hajime leaned into him; he was nothing but _warmth_ upon warmth, his mouth a sweet ache, lips parting beneath his. All of him soft and malleable and eager. Hands reaching for his shirt, his cheek, his waist. Laughing. _Finally._ Like there was nothing Hajime could do to hurt him.

  
  


Hajime can no longer remember how long they kissed, out there. It felt almost like cheating, the way he did it, utterly out of the blue. Just deciding that it was time. Standing up and seizing the steering wheel and driving them off the cliff, both of them grinning. Vertigo. They’d hit the ground a week later.

  
  


The next days were a smear of consciousness. Tooru’s backyard, his hands tangled in Hajime’s hair. His kitchen, Hajime wrapped around him from behind. His bedroom floor, their legs entangled, heads ducked together, noses, foreheads, lips brushing. His bedroom. His bed.

And all of it was like rapture. A decade’s backlog of things not done, which they had now decided to do; touches that were not just touches, but the hundred touches before that did not get to be, and could only be spoken through this one. The sacred work of compressing years of want into a single moment. It made all of it so rare, so sharp, kisses like one fire poured into another. _Do you know how long I have wanted to do this?_ they seemed to say. Tooru’s hands, pulling him as close as possible, and then closer. _I do. I do._

Everything else was forgotten. It was the last week of their third year, and this had never mattered less, because it was the first week of _this_ , something so enormous and overdue that it eclipsed the whole rest of the world. Hajime would duck out of class having paid attention to none of it, find Tooru, and the two of them would disappear around the back of the building or into an empty classroom and leave behind reality. It was reckless, and stupid, and so unlike them, but they wouldn’t be found. They had held off for so long, and were owed this by God.

And if they were found, they were graduating in a week. Tooru was moving to Argentina. Hajime to California. There was a whole backlog of years to cover and so little time; Tooru, spread out in a pool of sunlight, Tooru, his hair ruffled into a disaster, Tooru, parting and open and keening beneath him. There was so much to memorize before it disappeared. Hajime had never before known such urgency in himself. He kissed him, and needed to kiss him again.

  
  


Inevitability rose up in the background like a monster out of the lake. The night before graduation, they were in Hajime’s backyard, still so new and extraordinary beneath each other’s hands that they could each see nothing else. It had been only a handful of nights since their first together. Hajime’s mother had long gone to bed, and the only light was a single beam through the living room window, casting Tooru’s skin in dim white-gold. They were at the bottom of a pitch-dark sea, fireflies like particulate, Tooru straddling him as he lay in the damp dark grass, the only two people in the world.

Tooru’s words, between kisses, so private and candid that Hajime flinches when he remembers them now, like they were intended for someone else. _Your hair, Hajime. I always loved how your hair smells._

 _Yeah?_ The smile of the loved. 

Tooru’s hand at the nape of his neck. _And your skin._

_And what else?_

_I always wanted to kiss you here._ Tooru’s mouth at the soft swell of his throat.

Hajime caught him, and gently lifted his head, stroked his thumbs up his jaw. _Oh? Because I always wanted to kiss you here._ His mouth on Tooru’s mouth.

And then later, Tooru against him, leaning into him so fully, his head on Hajime’s chest, watching his fingers as he played with the grass. Hajime doesn’t remember what they talked about, only the buzz of it. Tooru’s whispered voice was a sweetness so singular that the rest of the world became static. They talked about graduation, probably, or the inevitability of things, or the number of evenings spent here not-touching, the stupidity that had endured for so many years. Or they talked about nothing, just to hear each other’s heartbeats. Hajime did not care. There was so little time left. He would take it all.

And then the memory snaps into focus. He still remembers the moment with painstaking clarity: Tooru tilted his head up to make eye contact through the dim, his cheek pulling against the fabric of Hajime’s t-shirt.

“D’you think, Hajime, that it’ll be any different?”

“What?”

“When we move to California.”

It took him a second to realize it. It was like the silent lightning strike that preceded thunder. Eerie vacuum stillness where the air itself shrunk, Tooru’s bright eyes smiling up at him, and then the earth was shaking.

Hajime shot halfway upright, and Tooru pulled away from him. “When we go to California?”

Tooru’s face was so innocent with shock that the sight of it ached. “What?” He looked at Hajime’s arm, where it was held out against him. “Yeah,” he said. “When we go to California.”

It would be years later, at the surprise party in Kyoutani’s apartment, that Hajime would understand this feeling again. It would be their friends experiencing it then, but it was him, now, with Oikawa in his arms: suddenly realizing that he was staring at a wreckage. A thousand glass plates hitting the floor. _When we go to California._ Disaster, hidden away where you couldn’t see it.

“When we go to California? Tooru, you’re—” His voice was so alien, so scratched-up with fear. “But you’re going to Argentina, right?”

Tooru’s face fell. Something flashed across it, shame, or hurt, or defiance. “I never. . .” His expression transformed, one unreadability into another. “I never said that I was going to.”

Fear began to thicken in Hajime’s chest. “But you said that you wanted to. I thought you said that you wanted to go. Don’t you want to go to Argentina?”

Tooru blinked at him, mouth closing, opening again. “Not if we’re. . .” He curled a hand into Hajime’s t-shirt. Hajime’s own unease was mirrored on his face. “Hajime, no, I’m not going to Argentina, not if we’re. . .” His eyes flicked to Hajime’s mouth.

The realization revised itself: Hajime was staring at a wreckage of his own making. A car flying off a cliff eventually lands. _I never should have kissed him._

Words began spilling through, launched out by sheer force of panic. “Tooru, no. No. You said that you wanted to go to Argentina. You can enter right into the Argentinian league. You’ll play volleyball again. Blanco will help you. You’ll make it in the professional leagues. It’s like he said.” He searched Tooru’s face, desperate for some kind of recognition, any glimmer of understanding. His fear had reached his throat. “What are you going to do in California?”

And then, Tooru smiled, so impossibly placid. There was a want written across his face, excruciatingly honest. Tooru traced a hand up Hajime’s chest, let his fingers rest at his throat, his cheek. It was the sweetest thing Hajime had ever felt. A love painfully simple. “It doesn’t matter, Hajime. I’ll be with you.”

Utter silence. His stomach plummeted, because he could picture it, the way Tooru was setting it out before them. An image of the future so bright it was blinding. A shared apartment in Irvine, yellow mornings, sun painting the floor gold, the bedsheets white. Tooru’s naked skin beneath his palms, every afternoon, every evening. His lips parting, his mouth sugar-warmth. A sweetness so singular that the rest of the world became static.

But what of him? What of Tooru? There was nothing for him in California. He wouldn’t be able to play volleyball. He’d get a degree in something he didn’t care about and play for a low-tier university team, if at all. He’d be tossing everything to the wind, at the fullest flush of his potential. He’d turn down a career in the Argentinian League. A route to the Olympics. The thing he had always wanted, always talked about. His starry-eyed childhood dream, hands splayed out in the sky—

For what? For Hajime?

 _Oh, God._ And maybe that was it. Maybe there was no one in the world who loved things as fiercely, as wholly as Tooru did. The threadbare Disneyland Tokyo t-shirt, a nostalgia for their youth so potent that he was destroying it, slowly, surely. The Super Sentai pen, the thing that he wouldn’t set down, no matter how much he cracked it. Volleyball. The jump serves. His own body coming apart beneath him, his pain smothered into irrelevance by the sheer force of his passion. It didn’t matter to him. Nothing would. He would drive himself into the ground, break himself slowly, if it meant that he got to play one more set. He cared that much. 

_It doesn’t matter. I’ll be with you._

Tooru loved things to the point of destruction. His own destruction, sometimes.

Maybe, Hajime thought, he was one of those things.

And he knew, in that moment, what he had to do. He was watching the car slam against the earth. The way he imagines doctors feel, staring at mangled limbs, knowing they’re going to have to cut them off. _Don’t make me do this._ It was the crystallization of horror. It was the strange, sobering sadness that came before tearing something free. _Please don’t make me do this, Tooru._

“No,” Hajime said. _Forgive me._ “You can’t, Oikawa.” _Please don’t let me be wrong._ “You have to go. You have to go to Argentina. I can’t let you do this.”

“What?” In the next second they’ve risen to their feet somehow, Oikawa an arm’s length from him, pushed away by Hajime’s outstretched hands, his mouth open in shock. “What?”

“I can’t let you do this to yourself,” Hajime said. “I can’t let you quit volleyball. For what? For what, Tooru? For _me?_ ”

“What are you talking about? Do you think that it matters? Do you think that I care about that?” Tooru’s eyes, suddenly glistening with hurt. “We always said that I was going to California!”

“That’s not true, Oikawa. You know that’s not true. You told me you were going to go with Blanco. To Argentina. That’s what I thought— That’s the only reason that I . . .”

Tooru’s bottom lip had begun to tremble. There it was, in Hajime’s chest, a shower of love, ready to split him through. _Don’t make me do this._ “The only reason that what? I changed my mind, Hajime. I don’t care. I want to be with you.”

And then there was nothing but a brilliant, keening ache, acute enough that he thought he would black out. Hajime’s gut was a white-hot tangle. _I want to be with you._ How was he supposed to be strong enough to push that away? How could he be asked to do this? “Oikawa, please think about this. The Argentinian league. Blanco is offering you a spot. He’ll help you.” Hajime took in a long, shuddering breath. “You have always wanted this. You have always told me you wanted this. Think about what you’re throwing away. Something like this is never going to happen again.”

 _“I don’t care about volleyball!”_ His eyes gleaming with wet, his voice cracked-open, skinned raw. “ _I don’t!_ ”

_“We both know that’s not true!”_

And Tooru’s face twisted, because it had struck. “No, I _don’t_ , Hajime, I really don’t, not since I—“

“You’re just _saying_ that you don’t care, Oikawa, because you _lost,_ ” Hajime said. The cruelest thing he’s ever done. _Forgive me. Please forgive me._ “You lose to Kageyama Tobio once and you act like you don’t care, because your pride is wounded, and it’s easier to lie and pretend volleyball means nothing to you than to own up to it. It’s cowardice.” He drew in another shuddering breath. “But you’re amazing at it, Oikawa, and now you’re going to throw everything away. You’ve never been so good at volleyball as you are right now. This is what you’ve always wanted. And you’re throwing it away for what? Because you lost to Tobio? Because this is easier?” He sucked in a breath. “Or are you throwing it away for _me?_ ” He let that hang in the air, listened to Tooru’s buckling silence. “No, Oikawa.” A final, wet exhale. “No. Don’t choose me over this. I can’t let you.”

Tooru’s expression shuttered entirely. There it was, that closing-off, that perfect stubbornness. He knew Hajime was right. He would never say it. He’d been struck, and the gates were lowered, his eyes watery and narrowed in anger. His voice was stunningly quiet, when he spoke.

“Well, that’s not your choice to make.”

Hajime felt himself suck in a breath. All of him ached, already, from the effort of trying to throw him into the wind. _Don’t do this. Don’t make me do this._ Is this what war medics did, in the field? Amputations by sheer force?

_If I’m wrong, please forgive me._

“You can’t come to California with me,” Hajime said, and it took everything he had, the shock of his own voice saying those words enough to knock the breath out of him. “I always said that I was okay with it. But I’m not—” He felt it, each sinew fissuring, splaying out like a split rope, tearing away from him, cartilage, bone, skin— _I want to be with you._ The sight of Tooru’s face was blurry, wet, the bottom of a swimming pool. Hajime tore again. Who would he be, if he let Oikawa do this? If he let Oikawa love him into oblivion? “I’m not okay with it. You can’t come to California with me. I changed my mind.”

Tooru just stood there. The worst possible thing he could do. The silence between them stretched across the backyard, between the trees, against the house, up the walls, the roof, until it splayed itself out against the sky. Perfect vacuum silence. Silence that vanished and re-birthed itself over and over again. The only sound Tooru’s face crumpling, the soft trickle of them both bleeding out.

It came, finally, after a lifetime. Whispered. “ _Do you mean it?_ ”

His voice like an open wound. The cruelest thing Hajime had ever done.

And maybe that was worst of all. _Do you mean it?_ Disbelief. Like he had thought there was nothing Hajime could do to hurt him.

“Yeah,” Hajime said. _Forgive me. Please forgive me._ “I do.”

Oikawa turned, tore away from him, and was gone.

  
  


Hajime would spend the next five years wondering what he had done.

  
  


<<<

  
  


A drive from Tokyo to Sendai is more than four hours long. A cheerful little line up the spine of Japan in a winsome shade of blue, and then the terrible news: _4h 22m._ Hajime sits outside Oikawa’s apartment in the sun-baked oven of his car and stares at his phone’s map and wonders, blankly, what the hell he thinks he is doing.

He and Oikawa had been texting back and forth, still, all week. Each morning he’d awoken and wondered if this was going to be the day that it started to feel normal again, or like anything other than the world’s most frightening and drawn-out game of chess, and thus far that day had not come. Oikawa talked about anything and everything. His team, their high school friends, the small absurdities that came with being an Olympic athlete the week before the Games. Like absolutely nothing was wrong. _They’ve started making us use hand sanitizer every time we touch a doorknob._ Hajime always laughed, like absolutely nothing was wrong.

And Hajime talked about— Hajime isn’t sure what he talked about. Hajime felt mostly like he sat there with his phone in his hands, submerged up to his neck in a feeling absurdly intense and utterly nameless, and offered encouraging replies to whatever Oikawa was saying, because he was so terrified at the thought that Oikawa actively picked up his phone and sought him out that he had no idea what else to do.

There had been a handful of times in the apartment where the feeling grew so swollen and urgent that he’d almost flipped out to Ueno about it, his phone open to their text conversation like it was legal evidence in court, something like: _Ueno look, Oikawa and I are talking again._ But what would Ueno do with that? There was nothing to fix. He would stare at Hajime blankly until he cracked up, and then maybe kick him. _And are you gonna die?_ No, he wasn’t gonna die.

He’d wondered, too, how this was any different from what they’d done over the phone for the past five years, pretending for their younger selves that they were still friends. He’d decided that maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was the same exact thing. But then his phone would light up and Oikawa would be there telling him something and Hajime’s insides would stir themselves into fire and he would trip over himself in his rush to reply. And they’re going to Sendai together. They’re going to Sendai together. To visit his mom. _Since we’re on the same continent again._ That’s different.

It is going to be worse, in person. There are a hundred things from the arena on Monday that he isn’t letting himself think about, among them the sky-blue of Oikawa’s uniform, the grown-up haircut, the way his eyes stretched wide open when Hajime asked him, _come up with me._ Elena’s gentle voice, her watchful gaze. _Today isn’t the first time he talked about you._ The realization that you’ve been looking at something wrong the whole goddamn time.

Oikawa [8:44]

be there 1 sec

And Hajime has to lean back into the driver’s seat to stop himself from typing out _Take your time, no worries,_ since he would only be doing it because his hands are on fire, and that would be excessive. Instead he takes his phone and places it in the holder wedged into the A/C vent, and stares at it long enough that the screen shuts off. 

The car door flies open some minutes later, after Hajime is convinced that he’s used up all the air in the vehicle, and suddenly Oikawa’s smile is there, and it is the only thing in the world.

“Sorry it took me so long!”

It is no better than in the stadium. He slides into the passenger seat and looks so impossibly adult, so impossibly self-contained, the top buttons of his shirt open in sun-kissed rebellion, blue, like the uniform. The years present their work on him proudly, with a flourish, saying _here are his arms up close,_ and _here are his eyes up close_ , and _here is everything else that he did and happened to him while you were gone, up close._ He settles into the seat, and turns his gaze to Hajime.

“That’s alright.” Hajime yanks his eyes away and taps at his phone helplessly, pulling up the cheerful map: _4h 22m._ It’s nearly fucking embarrassing to look at. _We’re really doing this._

Hajime taps the navigation into motion and clears his throat. “Ready to go?”

Oikawa looks to him, and there’s a split second where Hajime can catch it, flashing beneath the surface of his eyes, like a fish in a pool. Fear. He knows it’s a mirror. Oikawa smiles. “Yeah.”

Hajime tucks his arm behind Oikawa’s seat, turns his head around, and puts the car into reverse. He could almost laugh: vertigo, like driving off a cliff.

  
  


<<<

  
  


The one time he broke down to Ueno about it, they were twenty, and living together in Irvine. By that point his wounds were so thickly scabbed-over that he felt an almost-nothing when he ran his hands over them, and took this to mean that they were healed. 

He and Oikawa had begun calling again, when they were nineteen. Some shared coping mechanism. It had long dawned on both of them that things were not the same; things were decidedly very different, thinner, worse, a washed-out ghost of a relationship that both of them continued to poke at for— for what? Old habits die hard? So that they could look back in a few years after everything had come apart completely and say, hey, we tried?

And they had never explicitly agreed to do it, but neither of them told their friends what had happened. An unspoken mutual understanding, a final scrap of solidarity. _It will be easier if no one knows._ The world continued to spin on its axis beneath them, and their friends talked to them like they were still intact. A second reality beside and around theirs in which everything was fine. A reality which they, ironically, got to pretend to inhabit most of the time.

So, like any piece of real news, it didn’t come through Oikawa. Their phone calls were few and excruciating and contained as little information as possible. It came through Makki, or Mattsun, or Kindaichi, or some other blissfully ignorant mutual friend who had no idea the kind of wreckage they were looking at. Iwaizumi had been on his couch, tapping away at his homework, in the middle of a phone call. _Hey, since Oikawa left his team in San Juan—_

_What?_

_Huh? Yeah, he’s out of the League right now. Don’t you know?_

_Uh, no?_

_Team was looking to cut their second-string players, and he left before anything happened. He says he’s moving to Buenos Aires for a season._ A silence over the phone. _Did he not tell you?_

 _What?_ His stomach, plummeting. _No, yeah, he did, I just forgot for a second._

It was stunning, the way things repeated themselves. The number of scraps, half-images he got of Oikawa’s life, pieced together poorly into something that made him staggeringly sad. All of it from other people, none of it from Oikawa himself. And he sat with this one like a bomb in his hands. _He’s out of the League. His team was looking to cut their second-string players._

It took him an afternoon to blow up, to go to Ueno, runny-eyed, snotting, bleeding all over the place, every time-thickened scab suddenly fissured clean open. He cried so rarely; he had never cried in front of Ueno. He had never cried over this. He doesn’t remember how he opened, something like _Do you know my friend Oikawa, he—_

An hour later, Ueno knew. Iwaizumi was so entrenched in his distress that he didn’t even hesitate before telling him about the hammock, the week that stretched into oblivion, the fact that he kissed him, the words _I never should have kissed him._ And now: _I made him go. And he’s out of the league, now. I made him go. I told him he couldn’t come to California with me. And now he’s not even in the League._

Ueno had sat on the couch with his legs crossed at the ankle and done the best thing anyone could have done, which was stare up at the ceiling silently and think for a very long time.

“Do you think,” he’d said finally, and it was then that he pulled his gaze down to Hajime, a heap of himself on the floor. “That he’s going to regret it?”

“What?”

“Going to Argentina. Do you think that he’s going to regret it?”

Hajime had faltered. “I don’t . . .”

Ueno stood up. He was like a tower, so forceful, glowering down at him; it was then that it dawned on Hajime just how much he cared about him. Sometimes he needed to be kicked. “Because what you’re feeling right now is guilt. You think Oikawa is having a terrible time over there right now because of a decision you feel like you made for him. Maybe he is. But I don’t care. That happens to everyone, so I really don’t give a shit.” He folded his arms. “But you make it sound like Oikawa is one hell of a volleyball player. You only made him go 'cause you know it would work out for him eventually. Do you think that in, say, three years, that he’s going to regret it?”

Hajime met Ueno where he was at. He sat, and stared silently, and thought for a very long time. 

“I don’t think so.”

Ueno kicked him in the shin, smiled, and that was enough to well up another tide of tears. “Damn straight, Hajime.”

  
  


<<<

  
  


The most unusual thing about it is the silence.

When they were eighteen, in their third year, in the weeks leading up to the dive off of the cliff, Hajime had been there for some of Oikawa’s first hours driving a car, and Oikawa for some of his. (Doing things together like muscle memory, reaching without thinking, the gear shift, the brake, one another.) He hadn’t worried, then, if the silence was going to be long or awkward. He did not care, and at that point in his life probably could not be awkward with Oikawa if he wanted to. It turned out that _shittykawa_ was a terrible driver at first, and there was little silence between the shouting and the turning and the complaining and the beeping, and so for the first dozen hours Hajime didn’t get to find out.

But when Oikawa finally learned how to steer, they fell into a lull. And Hajime found out: there was no silence quite like that, in a car with Oikawa. There are beautiful hills outside of Sendai, lined up beside one another like yellow-green turtle shells, blister-bright in May. In them, Hajime learned to lean back into the passenger seat with Oikawa at the wheel, and both of them learned to listen to each other’s wordlessness. Tree-shadows, whipping over them in shades of blueblack, then back into the sunlight. Oikawa’s breath, in and out of him. Oikawa’s miracle hands gripping and re-gripping the wheel. Oikawa, peaceful. The rest of the world gone to static.

  
<<<

They drive from Tokyo to Sendai. They don’t talk, for most of it, and where Hajime expects there to be thick panic in his throat, there is nothing.

Maybe they’re both choosing to inhabit their younger selves. The highway stretches out before them in one long strip of white, they are silent, and Hajime imagines Oikawa imagining them: eighteen, blister-bright in May, dumb with their newfound freefom, rolling around Sendai in Hajime’s mom’s sedan just because they could. Hajime only imagines Oikawa imagining that because it’s the only thing he can think about. Maybe it’s one of their shared scraps of solidarity, the mutual decision to roll back the clock on this one, allow themselves to act out a small part of their previous lifetime. Warm silence, too nostalgic to hurt.

And, hell, they’ve spent five years saying things to each other over the phone without really saying anything. They’re here, now, _on the same continent again._ Maybe they’re trying the opposite. The nothing that says everything.

And Hajime suddenly barks out a laugh at that thought, because it’s a miracle that there’s _anything_ in the world that can get him to come up with a thought as lofty and contrived as _the nothing that says everything,_ and of course that one thing is Oikawa.

“What?” Oikawa asks. Hajime can hear the smile in his voice before he even glances. 

Hajime endures one second of eye contact with him, and can’t even bring himself to be embarrassed. They are so far off the cliff. “I just— I think it’s kind of absurd.” He clears his throat. _So we’re doing this, now._ “Do you remember when you first got your license?” 

That same smile. “Yeah.” The sound of Oikawa tapping his fingers against the window. “And I couldn’t make left turns for a month.”

“You couldn't even make right turns for a month, shittykawa.”

And they both inhale, because it’s such perfect muscle memory, such a perfect glimmer of _before,_ the habit that reveals itself just by being. _Shittykawa._ He’d never called him that over the phone. The awareness takes its place in the back seat like a third presence.

“That’s fair,” Oikawa says, finally, and that’s something different. In their previous lifetime he would have quipped back with something gleaming, so easy that Hajime can hear it: _You don’t appreciate my driving skills, Iwa-chan? Mean!_

The difference is startling enough that Hajime looks, and finds him staring out the window, smilingly placid. There are a hundred things that have happened to him that have gotten him from there to here, that Hajime has not seen. There are words to describe this new version of him that Hajime realizes he doesn’t have yet. 

“I don’t get to drive that much anymore in Buenos Aires,” Oikawa goes on, and he sounds— nostalgic. This is the first real exchange they’ve had the whole drive. “Once you’re on the national team they keep you away from it whether they mean to or not. I’m pretty sure I would crash if I had to make another left turn.” 

It’s so easygoing, so collected, so plainly casual, so unlike any Oikawa he’s ever seen. Hajime tries not to choke, tries to keep the ball rolling. “Oh? I’d offer to let you try, but it’s not my car.”

Oikawa quirks an eyebrow, puts on a cat-smile. _Oh, there he is._ “Whose car is it then, _Iwa-chan_?”

 _Iwa-chan._ So they’re _playing_ at it now. Hajime has to smother a grin. “Ueno, my roommate. Met him in Irvine. He’s staying in Osaka. Too stupid to realize he shouldn’t let me take his car around the country.”

Oikawa hums, nods, and eventually: “I think you’ve mentioned him.”

Hajime doesn’t look to check if Oikawa’s staring at him. That half-remembering, a feeling he knows so well. _I think you’ve mentioned this._ And it’s an absurdity that Oikawa only barely knows of Ueno, another gut-tugging reminder of how far they’ve gone. The two pieces of his life. Hajime re-grips the wheel, rallies himself. They’re doing this, now. “I would love for you to meet him, actually.” 

“Oh?”

Hajime thinks of Ueno kicking him, clubbing him over the head with his own childishness. _I really don’t give a shit about that, Hajime._ He smiles. “He was a soccer player in high school. Biggest idiot I know. You wouldn’t get along, but in the best way possible.”

And Oikawa laughs, just how Hajime had hoped.

  
  


Hajime’s mom had been very excited to hear that Oikawa was coming up. She’d only ever lived in reality in which nothing had gone wrong and no cars had flown off cliffs, and they had drifted, slightly, at worst. To her, a visit was perhaps the most obvious thing in the world, and long overdue. Her voice, three days ago, over the phone: _It’s been so long since I’ve seen Tooru! And he’s an Olympian?_

Hajime, too, had granted himself a moment of wonder, and the feeling of Oikawa’s given name in his mouth. _Yeah, mom, Tooru’s an Olympian._

They’re approaching Hajime’s porch before Hajime has time to prepare himself for it. His mom never moved, even after he graduated, and everything about the house is more or less the same. They pull up and park on the road, beside the thin rows of garden beds, all of it a little overgrown: lychee, and tomatoes, and basil, a clunky sedan in the driveway. Behind it all a sagging porch, weighed down by its own age, wind chimes in the window. Childhood. All of it thrown into technicolor by the afternoon sun.

Oikawa steps out of the car and drifts through it as if in a dream. Hajime can only watch the look of awe on his face and guess at what the feeling is like. Hajime’d returned for the holidays every year during undergrad, and gotten used to the coming and going, but Oikawa’s family had moved out of Sendai, and he hasn’t set foot in this place since before Argentina. It feels odd, to witness it, to watch Oikawa’s face change as the memory strikes him full-on. It’s not long before the years show off their work on him again: Oikawa stops to stare at the old sedan in the driveway, and in his dress pants and ridiculous flowy button-down he suddenly looks so full-grown, so wholly himself, that Hajime has to bury his fingernails in his palms.

“This was the car, right?” Oikawa glances up at him, and does a good job of hiding the apprehension on his face. He knows it’s the car, doesn’t need to ask; the question is pure nostalgic indulgence. _We’re doing this, right?_

Hajime unclenches his hand in his pocket. “Yeah, that’s the car.” He smiles despite himself. It was the first car Hajime ever drove, the second one Oikawa ever drove, the one they’d spent the most time getting lost in. Hills of sun outside of Sendai, dizzying freedom, the edge of adulthood like a precipice. “Dunno how many hours we spent in that thing.”

Hajime watches Oikawa stare at it and nod. He expects him to leave it at that, but he clears his throat and begins again, voice low: “I wouldn’t have guessed it would still be here.”

Hajime laughs. “Honestly? Me neither.”

The last hour of the drive up had been nothing but chatter, the two of them apparently bored of playing their previous selves, talking instead for the first time about the actual contents of their lives. It, like the silence from before, made Hajime hold his breath in anticipation of a panic that simply never came. Oikawa told him about his team— _really_ told him about his team, the libero he was closest with, the two middle blockers he’d shared an apartment with in San Juan, who had made him watch soap operas with them every night until he understood Spanish. _Marcelo and Benjamin. They were so mean to me, Iwa-chan, you would love them!_

He dipped into it, sometimes, the glittery theatrics of his youth, the name _Iwa-chan_ , but it was like a shared joke. As if to say, _Remember when we were like that?_ And Hajime would laugh, helpless, _Yes._

And in return Hajime had told him about Ueno, about their years in undergrad, their internship in Osaka, professor Utsui, the one time he ran into Ushijima, which Oikawa had caught wind of at the time, a text message Hajime had only dared to send in light of the sheer absurdity of it all. 

_Oh, that was like the time I ran into Shouyou in Brazil!_ Oikawa said.

Hajime had heard about that, too, at the time, and he tried not to jerk his head too fast now— _Shouyou._ Not _Shortie-pie,_ but _Shouyou_. He caught a fondness on Oikawa’s face, something distant, inaccessible. Maybe he shouldn’t assume things. Maybe he shouldn’t assume that— Hajime had re-gripped the steering wheel. Five years was a long time. He’d had his own five years, too.

And they’re both standing in the driveway, now, staring at the car, remembering for the hundredth time just how long five years really is. Oikawa scrunches up his face. Hajime can tell he’s laughing at himself, at the memories locked inside. “I mean, given how I drove this thing, I’m impressed that it even made it past graduation. D’you think—”

“Tooru?” A voice from the porch.

Both heads jerk up. Hajime’s mother is there, only halfway through the door, wrapped in a sundress and an apron, beaming a half-decade’s backlog of fondness at Oikawa. The windchimes are blowing beside her, the lights are on in the kitchen, there’s dinner waiting for them, like so many evenings of their youth. The sight of it melts Hajime, utterly. And for a dizzying moment he sees them the way she must see them: simply lingering, chatting in the driveway, an arm’s length between them, never really apart to begin with. Never really apart.

Hajime doesn’t have a chance to see what it does to Oikawa’s face; the sight of it only worsens when Oikawa bounds over to her, calling her name, and sweeps her up into a years-overdue hug. Hajime jogs behind him to catch up, his chest a cage for something warm and rattling. Hajime’s on the steps, and his mother is grabbing Oikawa’s arms and talking to him, and he’s tipping his head back and laughing at something she’s saying, but Hajime is deaf to it.

It’s so easy to imagine, with Oikawa smiling down at her, with his stupid open-front shirt and his grown-up dress pants, with her beaming at the two of them like they are the whole world. It’s so easy to imagine that the wreckage never took place. That they were never really apart. No one ever told his mother about it. It’s not there, for her. 

Oikawa glances over at him; beams. Maybe it doesn't have to be there for them either.

  
  


For the next two hours Hajime gets to sit back and listen, and pretend. Oikawa is so animated, so sweet to his mother, every bit himself, every bit who he was when they were seventeen and he ate here every other night. He never forgot. They step into the kitchen and are invited to take off the layers of years built up on them, to hang them up elsewhere, and to settle into the world everyone else has inhabited the whole time. They steal glances, as if to say _We’re doing this, right?_ And Hajime’s mother is there, beaming at them. In her eyes they are whole; who are they to act like anything else?

Hajime’s mother wants to know everything. Unlike Hajime she can do no wrong and cannot hurt Oikawa and is free to ask all the questions he cannot. She wants to see every inch of San Juan, every practice, every word of Spanish, every event that brought Oikawa from there to here, from that lifetime into this one. And Oikawa beams and tells her everything, tells _them_ everything, roars with laughter at her quips, at Hajime’s shoves beneath the table. Talks about Jose Blanco, and his first team in San Juan, the season in Buenos Aires, the trips to Brazil, meeting Shouyou, the years piling on top of one another. And then: deciding to trade citizenship, the tryouts for the national team. The months of work. The blood-buzz evening in his apartment with his roomates when he got the call. _Lo hiciste._ _You’ve made it._ And then the singular, enormous unreality that is the Olympics, the paperwork, the doctors, the drug tests, the flights, the persistent fear that it’s all somehow a dream.

He presents it all with a smile, with that devastating self-custody Hajime glimpsed in the car, the kind of quiet composure that can afford to laugh at itself; the kind that was so never his, until now. _Returning to Tokyo was so weird,_ Oikawa says. _It was so weird. But I’m glad that I’m here again. And—_ he laughs, glances at Hajime, pure vertigo. _I’m pretty sure it’s not just a dream._

It’s like watching Oikawa unveil himself, slowly, lift up the cable they’d let fall into the Gulf of Mexico, make eye contact with him, and begin to reel it in, story by story. Glances thrown at Hajime, as if to say, _You’re right, I’m doing this now._ It’s all Hajime can do to stay rooted in his seat.

And slowly, it blurs together. The line between pretending and being. They’re loose-lipped; Hajime calls him _Tooru_ and kicks his feet under the table when he says something stupid, because that’s the reality his mother lives in; Oikawa calls him _Iwa-chan,_ because that’s who they were back then, and who they get to be again tonight. They lean in close, they laugh at each other, Oikawa takes Hajime’s arm and uses it to show his mom where their libero got a nasty sprain right before an important match, and when he lets go his fingers leave behind bands of white heat on Hajime’s skin. Hajime wonders if that’s part of the pretending.

Hajime waits for the ball to drop the whole time. He pours himself a second glass of wine and waits for the part where Oikawa stands up and says, _Actually, Hajime and I stopped talking a year ago. Actually, Hajime and I haven’t seen each other at all in the past half-decade. Actually, we’re just pretending things are fine, right now, just for you._

But that part never comes. Oikawa smiles at him from across the table when his mother’s not looking, and Hajime waits for that light in his eyes to drop, for the act to slip, and it never does. Oikawa only beams.

“—And it’s all so soon! Oh, Tooru, it’s all so soon.” Hajime’s mother is on her second glass of the wine Oikawa’s brought as a gift. _It’s my all-time favorite, Iwa-chan. Argentinean wine will ruin you forever._ “It starts in, what? A week? Oh, Tooru.” She’s inconsolable with glee. “You’re going to do amazing.”

Oikawa smiles, nods down at his own glass. He holds it gingerly, like a trophy. “First match is against Germany. We have the rare privilege of waiting until the fourth day of the Games for any of our matches to start.”

Hajime’s mother is buzzed and happy enough to completely miss the irony of that; she simply leans over the table and stares Hajime straight in the face and asks: “You’re going, right? Oh, I’ll have to go to one of them. You’ll have to take me. You’ll just have to beat Germany, Tooru. And then the whole rest of them. You can do that for me, right?”

Oikawa grins at her, every piece of him genuine. “Of course I can. I just— One second—” His face falls, he reaches into his pocket, digs his phone out, and stares at it blankly for a second as it buzzes in his hand. “My coach.” He flashes both of them another grin. “Sorry, I gotta—”

And then he’s vanished from the table, and Hajime’s staring at his back as he disappears. They both listen, as Oikawa slides open the door to the back porch, and begins laughing into the receiver, speaking Spanish. It will never not make Hajime’s stomach swoop.

When Hajime finally tears his gaze away and looks back to his mom, she’s smiling a love at him so plain that it aches. He briefly wonders what kind of love is written on his own face, and then he grips his wine glass harder, as if to steady himself. 

“I’m so glad,” she says finally, and she sighs herself deeper into her chair, “that nothing’s really changed.”

Hajime opens his mouth, and feels the cold blankness within himself for a split second. It’s almost cruel. He doesn’t know how to answer that. He swallows, turns his gaze to the floor, the wall, the— 

The back window, where Oikawa disappeared out onto the porch. It’s dark, but Oikawa’s there, phone pressed to his cheek, speaking into it, watching Hajime, waiting for him to look. When he catches his gaze, he lights up, and then pulls a stupid face. 

Hajime is static, suspended in air. He feels his face split into a grin. Through the window, Oikawa mirrors him. They hold each other there, for an infinitely long second.

“Yeah,” he says. And it’s tentative, like hope. “Me too.”

  
  


“Your mother is a delight.”

Hajime raises both eyebrows at him, lifts his glass to his lips. He is pleasantly buzzed, enough to talk to Oikawa without thinking about it. “Like you’ve never met her before.”

Oikawa reshuffles his legs, left ankle over right, right over left; they’re both on the back porch, now, summer night-air so humid it’s the bottom of a dark swimming pool, everyone floats. Oikawa most of all, spread out over two chairs, head tipped back into the sky. Hajime’s mom has long since gone to bed, and the only source of light is a single beam through the window from the lamp in the living room, casting Oikawa’s skin in dim white-gold. Hajime came out here with his third glass of wine only moments ago, and they’re supposed to leave tonight, but Hajime’s staring at Oikawa and is so deeply entrenched in the living memory of him that he doesn’t think he’ll ever get out. Does not want to.

“I know I have, but. . .” Oikawa trails off. Hajime watches as the smile works its way across his lips. “I don’t mind being reminded.”

“Mmph.” Hajime lets himself study Oikawa’s cheek, turned to him. “She means it, you know.”

“Huh?”

“Coming to see your matches. One of them, at least. I’ll bring her.”

Oikawa bursts into a grin. “I don’t doubt it.”

“No getting off the hook, now that you’re an Olympian.”

Oikawa looks to him, then, eyes flashing in the lamplight. And Hajime has thought it a hundred times, and he will think it a hundred more, until it isn’t true, which it never will be: Oikawa looks like himself a dozen times over. The godforsaken billowy shirt, the golden tan, the intricate solidity of his limbs. Like he’s unfolded into himself. Like an Olympian.

“It’s funny,” Oikawa says, then, and it’s so quiet. “To hear that. I don’t think it’ll ever be normal.”

“What?”

Oikawa exhales, smiles. “Being called an Olympian.”

“Well,” Hajime says, and he can’t keep the stupid grin off his face. “You are one, shittykawa, and you earned it, so get used to it.”

The _shittykawa_ isn’t even a joke this time, it’s an earnest comfort, and it softens the pinch between Oikawa’s brows, until he’s half-smiling.

And then something in Oikawa’s expression releases, is replaced by something else. “Well,” he begins. The look he gives Hajime next is long, and deliberate, and Hajime sucks in a breath, because he can tell something is careening towards him before it arrives: “I did get used to being Argentinian, Hajime.”

 _Hajime._ It strikes as if thrown. The realization of what you’re looking at. _Oh, so we’re doing this now._

Hajime pulls in a steadying breath, resettles himself into his chair, resettles himself again. No more rehearsal. All the while Oikawa watching him. Patient. Quietly collected. Aware of what he’s doing. Tentative, like hope.

“You wouldn’t have—” And Hajime has to stop, has to start the sentence over again. He could laugh. A conversation he’s imagined so many times that it feels like a memory. Ueno kicking him. _What you’re feeling is guilt, Hajime._ It’s there, still, barbed and contorted, stinging in his gut. “You wouldn’t have gone,” Hajime says, and it takes all of him. He can’t even pretend to hide the shake in his voice. “To Argentina. You wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t told you.”

Oikawa’s eyes, unmoving. Hajime offered it like a statement, but they both know it’s a question. 

There sits, somewhere neither of them can access, a reality in which Oikawa came to California with him. And maybe it’s exactly how Oikawa had set it out before them, the day they crash-landed. An image of the future so bright it blinds. A shared place in Irvine. Tooru’s bare skin beneath his palms every morning, every evening, his mouth parting into sugar-warmth. The kind of sense-memory so candid you flinch at it. You flinch at the distance between it and yourself. 

But maybe it’s not like that. Maybe in that reality in California they crash-landed elsewhere, and they’re not on Hajime’s back porch in Sendai right now, and Oikawa is not looking at him like their lives depend on it. In that one, Oikawa is most certainly not an Olympian. Oikawa is most certainly not sun-kissed, Spanish-speaking, so grown-up, so folded-out into the fullest possible flush of himself that looking at him is a violent, keening ache. In that one they are not here.

In this one, Oikawa does not pull his gaze from him. And maybe this conversation is like a memory to him, too. Hajime does not know how many times he’s practiced the next thing he says: “No, I wouldn’t have gone to Argentina. Not if you didn’t tell me.”

Hajime has known that, for the past half-decade, which is dumb and useless because it makes it no less difficult and terrible to hear. He opens his mouth, to speak, but Oikawa is there before him:

“But you said it—” Oikawa begins, and then he has to start his sentence over again. “But you only told me to go because you didn’t think that you were worth it to me.”

Hajime goes still entirely. His wine glass floats in his hand. It’s like if he moves it’ll break. Of all the times that he’s imagined this conversation in his head, Oikawa staring him down, telling him— 

“That’s why you made me go.”

And there’s no judgement in Oikawa’s gaze. It’s utter calm. It’s the painstaking self-custody, the years-earned composure. The understanding of it as fact, as what happened, full stop. _You didn’t think you were worth it to me._ Hajime is useless and can’t argue with a truth that solid.

So Hajime, helpless, reaches for what he needs. The question is quiet, wrapped up in years of itself, all the versions that were never asked: “Well, was I wrong?”

“What?”

“To make you go?”

There’s no anger in the question, no expectation, no demand for a _no._ Just a five-year backlog of the need for an answer, a palm outstretched in perfect, aching want. Be honest. _What you’re feeling is called guilt, Hajime._ _It’s called guilt._

“To make me go? Were you wrong to make me go?” Oikawa recognizes it, then, his head lifting off the back of the chair, his eyes meeting Hajime’s in sudden alarm. His lips parted in surprise, shock. _So that’s what you need to hear. Oh, God._ And then, his fullest grin, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He is so happy to tell him: “No, Hajime. God, you weren’t. You definitely weren’t.”

And maybe it’s the closest thing to turning back time. To staring at a wreckage, and watching it unravel itself, lift off the earth, piece itself back together until it’s whole and soothed and whole again. Maybe it was never such a wreckage to begin with. Five years is a long time. So is a moment, and in this one Hajime is pure static. The world is static, and so is he, and Tooru’s smile is the only thing in the world.

He’s pretty sure Tooru is laughing at his relief, then, or saying something stupid to him, but Hajime cannot hear it and does not care. The air is a swimming pool around them, fireflies like particulate, the night sky a mica-spangle, and they’re eighteen, in the dew-grass, and the only two people in the world, and—

“But you were wrong about one thing,” Tooru says, then, cutting through the silence. The cat-smile is not entirely gone, but it is more quiet. Sober. He studies Hajime’s face. The porch falls into a hush.

“What?”

Tooru sees his apprehension, and has never smiled brighter. He has never been so happy to tell him something. He leans over the side of the chair, over the Andes, Panama, the Yucatan, over a distance of years, from that lifetime into this one. “About what you’re worth to me.”

  
  


<<<

  
  


It’s in the car, the next morning, after they’ve hugged and kissed Hajime’s mom goodbye. They’d spent the night in Sendai half-accidentally, Hajime on the couch, Tooru in his bedroom upstairs. The night had been too late, Hajime too buzzed to drive, his mother too accommodating, Tooru’s gaze far too bright, hands too sweet and soothing on Hajime’s shoulders. _S’okay, Hajime, I can make a call or two, they won’t kill me too hard if I show up late for practice. Even_ Olympians _get to be tardy sometimes._ Hajime had been drunk enough with the night’s dozen miracles to laugh himself stupid.

Tooru slides into the passenger seat the next morning, billowy shirt a little more wrinkled, a lot more unbuttoned, smile a little looser, coffee in his hands that had been put there by Hajime’s mom. He is shamelessly sleepy. The bedhead version of his grown-up haircut is just as bad as his teenage haircut was, only more cocksure, and it’s all Hajime can do to stop himself from ruffling it even worse.

And Hajime’s not sure what makes him say it, exactly. He sees it, when he shoves his phone into its holder on the A/C and opens the navigation app, and the map accidentally flies open to show the whole Pacific. The little red dot that means _you are here,_ situated along the crook in Japan’s spine. Another blue dot, on the other side, nestled along the Californian coast. Irvine, where he had his apartment’s address marked last year.

Hajime stills. Irvine, where he still has a job lined up for the fall, if he wants. It’s hovered over him all summer. Utsui has a position open in his lab. _Just say the word, Iwaizumi, and it’s yours,_ he’d said. Hajime hadn’t made a decision yet.

A breath enters him of its own accord. He has to force his hands up to the ignition, up to the wheel, the gear shift, his foot to the brake, remembering each step. He taps the map, and it zooms in on Japan, and he watches it the whole way. It directs them towards Tokyo. He exhales.

“You know,” Hajime begins, and he has to smile, because there it is again. Vertigo, like driving off a cliff. You’d think he’d learn. He puts the car in reverse, twists around to put a hand behind the passenger seat, and turns to stare blankly out of the rear windshield. Tooru is so close. He can see his shitty bedhead out of the corner of his eye. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I have a job lined up in Irvine for the fall, and—”

He cuts himself off to begin reversing down the driveway. His eyes are fixed perfectly on the road, perfectly not on Tooru’s eyes, which he knows are on him. Hajime is batshit insane. “I haven’t made a decision yet, and I don’t know what your plans are, after the Olympics, and I know you said you were probably staying in Japan, but—”

He has to start the sentence over again; they’re nearing the mailbox, he’s rolling the wheel counter-clockwise. He laughs at himself, a little, at his hammering heartbeat, the white-hot roaring in his ears. Tooru is so close, his eyes like beacons. Hajime is insane. “But we always talked about you moving to California with me, and, I mean, if it’s possible for you next year, I would actually—”

“ _STOP THE CAR._ ”

“ _WHAT?_ ” Hajime slams on the brakes; the car screeches to a halt, they both jostle back and then forward. “What? Tooru?" Hajime whips his head around, eyes blown-wide, heart in his throat, hand splayed out against the wheel. “Did I hit something?”

And then Tooru is laughing at him, and he is so mean, and he is so stunning, and his face is so bright, and Hajime is confused only for the split second that it takes for Tooru to lean in and kiss him.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this will be long!
> 
> brief side note: the disneyland tokyo shirt is a detail taken directly from the legendary iwaoi fic [the courtship ritual of the hercules beetle.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6422014?view_full_work=true) it is such a delicious piece of characterization that i knew i had to use it here. please go read that fic, this one would not exist without it.
> 
> my name is june, i'm 18, i'm from new york, and this series is my love note to haikyuu, which is ending the day i post this. it has been a ridiculously important part of my entire young adult life, and is the reason why i write. you could call this last part a love note to oikawa tooru in particular, that glittery bastard (whose smug aura mocks me) god. i love him. i hope it’s clear how much i love him
> 
> as i write this, i don’t know yet whether or not oikawa actually returns in the final chapter of haikyuu, which is a dramatic irony so exquisite that i have the urge to eat my laptop. i wrote this over the course of 9 days on a cross-country road trip, in hotels, in cars, in apartments, in highway rest stops, on my phone when i had to. when leaks started coming out i made my brother change my twitter password so that i wouldn’t be able to look no matter how bad i wanted to. i’ve been loudly theorizing about oikawa’s return (and a story like this) on twitter since april, but i decided, basically, that telling his story here was so fiercely important to me that i was going to write it no matter which direction canon went, and that to do so meant going dark. i’m speaking to you now from a hotel room in south dakota, in which i chugged a spiked seltzer and 300mg of caffeine at midnight, finished this goddamn thing over the past six hours, and have not slept. i am almost deliriously happy. i have been in love with haikyuu for half a decade. in a couple of hours, i get to find out how it ends.
> 
> and i get to share this story with you guys, too, and i am safe and cozy knowing what happens to oikawa in this one, and that he gets his happy ending. and if canon resembles this thing even at all? well. i’ll drink to that!!!
> 
> thank you for being here with me. the amount of fun i have had writing this series is insane. the amount of fun i’ve had being a part of haikyuu fan spaces online is insane. elmo, mai, elo, bree, tee, you know who you are. only love. ONLY LOVE!
> 
> and this doesn’t mean i’m done! i’m just getting started. but the manga is ending, and i wanted to end this series on a bang, with it. thanks for being here, letting me lead you through the halls of my love for this manga, for oikawa tooru, that glittery bastard. comments, kudos, retweets, love letters all make me go off the rails with happiness.
> 
> here is my [twitter,](https://twitter.com/summersugawara) where i am crying. god. i am grateful for all of you. here’s to fucking haikyuu.


End file.
